This UNCCD-SPI technical report provides well-established scientific evidence for understanding the strong linkages between land use and drought and how management of both is connected through water use. It introduces a new concept of Drought-smart land management (D-SLM) and organizes relevant approaches and practices in fourteen groups across four major classes of land use.

This infographic builds on the Regional Dialogue on Women’s Inclusion in Landscape Management,
organized by WOCAN in partnership with RECOFTC and The Forests Dialogue, 7-9 Oct. 2014, Thailand

This report suggests that a new and explicit goal of sustainable development to be agreed as a result of Rio+20 should be the reduction of the rate of land degradation to achieve land degradation neutrality, which we refer to as “Zero Net Land Degradation” or ZNLD.

Over the past decade, stakeholders have made a variety of generalized claims concerning women’s landownership, both globally and in Africa.

This paper reviews the available data on men’s and women’s land rights, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Building on the conceptual framework developed in 2014 by Doss et al., we utilize nationally representative individual- and plot-level data from Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste to calculate five indicators: incidence of ownership by sex; distribution of ownership by sex; and distribution of plots, mean plot size, and distribution of land area, all by sex of owner.

Dryland mountains are among the least-known environments in the world, and certainly one of the most overlooked by decision- and policy-makers. Dryland mountains have an outstanding strategic value. They act as water towers for surrounding dry lowland areas, as shown by the examples of the Rocky Mountains of North America, the Central Andes, the mountains of the Mediterranean Basin, the Sahara and Sub-Saharan Africa, West Asia, and Central Asia

The Restoration Opportunities Optimization Tool (ROOT) was developed out of a need to more efficiently and effectively communicate the importance of ecosystem services to decision makers.

IUCN’s collective experience working to increase ecological productivity and improve human well-being through forest landscape restoration (FLR) demonstrated that although stakeholders were interested in generating ecosystem services from proposed restoration activities, the many services and their interactions with each other were often too complicated to communicate clearly.

Land restoration has tremendous potential to help the world limit climate change and achieve its aims for sustainable development. In its latest study, the International Resource Panel finds positive spin-offs to support all 17 Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by the world’s nations as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. While other reports have focused on a subset of the SDGs, this report has intentionally considered all of them, and has done so by inviting a large number of diverse authors to participate in the process.

Although there is global consensus that women’s land rights are fundamental for the realization of food security and rural development, accurate and reliable statistics to monitor the attainment and realisation of these rights are still lacking. Indeed, the lack of clear and accurate statistics on landownership and land management– that are disaggregated by sex - is problematic for developing clear policy responses to, and for monitoring of, inequalities faced by women and men in rural areas.

The eradication of hunger and poverty largely depend on how people, communities and others gain access to land. The livelihoods of many, particularly the rural poor including women, are based on secure and equitable access to and control over land and other natural resources. Land is a source of food and shelter; the basis for social, cultural and religious practices; and a central factor in economic growth.

This practitioner’s guide explains how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes. It is aimed at those taking up this challenge in developing countries. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Rather, it involves taking advantage of opportunities that emerge in various institutional arenas such as policy and law-making and implementation, government administration, customary or community-based tenure governance, or forest restoration at the landscape scale.

Women’s economic empowerment is essential in promoting equality between women and men and is a precondition for sustainable development.