‘Over the past three decades hundreds of thousands of farmers in Burkina Faso and Niger, on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, have transformed large swathes of the region’s arid landscape into productive agricultural land, improving food security for about three million people. Once-denuded landscapes are now home to abundant trees, crops, and livestock.'

Drylands occupy more than 40% of the world’s land area and are home to some two billion people. This includes a disproportionate number of the world’s poorest people, who live in degraded and severely degraded landscapes.

The Maghreb's oases systems provide a major contribution to the region's food security, economy and natural resources. Despite this potential, oasis ecosystems are threatened by a range of complex factors related to the expansion of agricultural land and increasing scarcity of water resources.

The Re-Greening of the West African Sahel has attracted great interdisciplinary interest since it was originally detected in the mid-2000s. Studies have investigated vegetation patterns at regional scales using a time series of coarse resolution remote sensing analyses. Fewer have attempted to explain the processes behind these patterns at local scales.

Desertification is defined as land degradation occurring in the global drylands. It is one of the global problems targeted under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 15). The aim of this article is to review the history of desertification and to evaluate the scientific evidence for desertification spread and severity.

The support plan for the Sahel is a regional approach to collectively address the root causes of disruptions such as poverty, migration and youth unemployment, climate change, insecurity, governance and institutional issues in the region.

Vast swathes of land, from Africa to the Middle East, are being left useless by climate shifts and human pressures such as deforestation, mining and farming, threatening to hike migration and conflict. The accelerating damage could cost the global economy a staggering $23 trillion by 2050 - and rich countries as well as poor will pay the price.

Interview with Ibrahim Thiaw

Located in the arid and semi-arid areas of West Africa, the Sahel has undergone profound changes over the past 50 years.

Tetra Tech’s land tenure and property rights experts examine how weak land and resource governance can fuel drivers of violent extremism. With a focus on the African Sahel, this new issue brief finds this dynamic is especially prevalent when land and resource governance challenges are coupled with environmental disruptions, resource scarcity, or migration.

The critical role of forests in climate change mitigation and adaptation is now widely recognized. Forests contribute significantly to climate change mitigation through their carbon sink and carbon storage functions.

The AQUASTAT Programme was initiated with a view to presenting a comprehensive picture of water resources and irrigation in developing countries and providing systematic, upto-date and reliable information on water for agriculture and rural development.

La FAO ha presentado a título de contribución a la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Agua un documento de base titulado "Agua para la Agricultura" (DOC. E/CONF.70/ 11). Este documento pasa en revista los aspectos técnicos, económicos y sociales del agua en la agricultura y propone un programa de acción para aumentar la produoción alimentaria.