Game changers to achieve sustainable intensification of agriculture are possible in the irrigation sector and they focus mainly on getting more with less. There is, however, still a long way to go to replicate, adapt and develop approaches to take such ideas to scale and increase productivity within existing agricultural water management contexts.

In the last decades, due to climate changes, soil deterioration and land use/land cover (LULC) changes, land degradation (LD) has become one of the most important issues at the global, regional and local scale. In concrete terms, LD determines a reduction in the productivity of a territory and in its capacity of providing ecosystem goods and services. “Syndromes” of LD can be assessed in the past, and scenarios, conversely, can be developed for the future, as information baselines for sustainable land management strategies and interventions.

There has been a concerted effort by the international scientific community to understand the multiple causes and patterns of land-cover change to support sustainable land management. Here, we examined biophysical suitability, and a novel integrated index of “Economic Pressure on Land” (EPL) to explain land cover in the year 2000, and estimated the likelihood of future land-cover change through 2050, including protected area effectiveness.

Scenario analysis constitutes a valuable deployment method for scientific models to inform environmental decision-making, particularly for evaluating land degradation mitigation options, which are rarely based on formal analysis. In this paper we demonstrate such an assessment using the PESERA–DESMICE modeling framework with various scenarios for 13 global land degradation hotspots.

Examples of sustainable land management (SLM) exist throughout the world. In many cases, SLM has largely evolved through local traditional practices and incremental experimentation rather than being adopted on the basis of scientific evidence. This means that SLM technologies are often only adopted across small areas. The DESIRE (DESertIfication mitigation and REmediation of degraded land) project combined local traditional knowledge on SLM with empirical evaluation of SLM technologies.

Managing land sustainably is a huge challenge, especially under harsh climatic conditions such as those found in drylands. The socio-economic situation can also pose challenges, as dryland regions are often characterized by remoteness, marginality, low-productive farming, weak institutions, and even conflict. With threats from climate change, disputes over water, competing claims on land, and migration increasing worldwide, the demands for sustainable land management (SLM) measures will only increase in the future.

Since the late 1980s, sustainable land management is one of the objectives of the European Commission in Less Favoured Areas. In this paper, we investigate the economic and environmental sustainability of farming systems in two less favoured areas in Centro and Alentejo areas of Portugal. The specific objectives were the following: (i) to characterise the farming systems; (ii) to analyse their development over a 20‐year period (1989–2009); and (iii) to investigate to what extent these farming systems contribute to sustainable land management.

The Alqueva reservoir created the largest artificial lake of Western Europe in 2010. Since then, the region has faced challenges due to land-use changes that may increase the risk of erosion and shorten the lifetime of the reservoir, increasing the need to promote land management sustainability. This paper investigates the aspect of seasonality of soil erosion using a comprehensive methodology that integrates the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) approach, geographic information systems, geostatistics, and remote-sensing.

Indonesia is subject to rapid land use change. One of the main causes for the conversion of land is the rapid expansion of the oil palm sector. Land use change involves a progressive loss of forest cover, with major impacts on biodiversity and global CO₂ emissions. Ecosystem services have been proposed as a concept that would facilitate the identification of sustainable land management options, however, the scale of land conversion and its spatial diversity pose particular challenges in Indonesia.

Over the past 15 years, northwest Cambodia has seen dramatic agrarian expansion away from the central rice plain into the peripheral uplands fuelled by peasant in-migration. Against this background, we examine the nature of relations between the peasantry and the state. We first show the historical continuities of land control processes and how the use of violence in a post-conflict neoliberal context has legitimised ex-Khmer Rouge in controlling land distribution.

FAO Informative Material for the International Year of Soils (IYS 2015).

De Balans van de Leefomgeving geeft parlement, kabinet en samenleving een feitelijk onderbouwd inzicht in de huidige kwaliteit van de fysieke leefomgeving. De Balans is de tweejaarlijkse peilstok van het PBL die aangeeft in hoeverre de door de politiek zelf ten doel gestelde leefomgevingskwaliteit tijdig wordt bereikt. De Balans van de Leefomgeving 2014 heeft als motto meegekregen: de toekomst is nú.