In 2015 we celebrated world leaders’ recognition of the foundational and strategic role that sustainable land management must play t o advance biodiversity conservation and climate resilience.
IUCN unveiled a Global Standard providing the first-ever set of benchmarks for nature-based solutions to global challenges. The new IUCN Global Standard will help governments, business and civil society ensure the effectiveness of nature-based solutions and maximise their potential to help address climate change, biodiversity loss and other societal challenges on a global scale.
As investments in nature are needed more than ever, and are increasingly gaining traction, the challenge is to identify environmental and social risks and to demonstrate positive impacts associated with investing in nature-based projects in a standardized and comparable manner.
This study develops options for the German government to improve international soil governance in the short, medium and long term. The study first takes stock of existing international instruments and institutions that are relevant for soil protection and its governance at the international level.
Nature loss is a planetary emergency. Humanity has already wiped out 83% of wild mammals and half of all plants and severely altered three-quarters of ice-free land and two-thirds of marine environments. One million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades – a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.
At the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Summit on 25-26 September 2015, world leaders adopted the global framework ‘Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’, which included 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets.
Life on Earth depends on healthy soils. The soil under our feet is a living system – home to many fascinating plants and animals, whose invisible interactions ensure our well-being and that of the planet. Soils provide us with nutritious food and other products as well as with clean water and flourishing habitats for biodiversity.
It is estimated that 20% of global land is either degraded or undergoing degradation, leading to an annual loss of 12 million hectares of productive land (UNCCD 2017). In Africa, some 715 million ha are degraded, including 65% of all arable land, 30% of all grazing land and 20% of all forests.
In a world in which poverty is increasingly concentrated in vulnerable or fragile states, and fragility is increasingly driven by climate change, climate-induced displacement has become one of the most visible manifestations of the relationship between ecological and societal breakdown.
The United Nations General Assembly declared 2021 to 2030 as the decade of ‘ecosystem restoration’, signalling a global consensus on the urgency to restore degraded lands.
