The Lawra district of the Upper West region was selected as the case study. This study compared crop yields for FMNR and non-FMNR farmers. FMNR farmers are classified as having at least 8 trees per acre, with an average of 13 trees per acre (33 per ha) and a maximum of 40. Non-FMNR farmers are classified as having between 1 and 7 trees per acre, with an average of 5.Qualitative (focus group discussion) and quantitative (household survey) data were collected in April to May 2019. Over 500 households were interviewed in both CIKOD intervention communities and control sites.

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. The World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as one of the top five threats humanity will face in the next ten years.

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. Newest figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reveal that over 70% of the 33 million newly displaced people (2019) had climate-related triggers.

Land use change is a major global driver of pandemic risk. Land usechange is a significant driver of the transmission and emergence of infectious diseases 40,177-179. Land use changeis cited as the cause of over 30% of emerging infectious diseases, and correlates significantly withthe emergence of novel zoonoses globally 13,180. However, the mechanisms by which diseases emergeare context-specific and scale-dependent.

Land is the foundation of our life; stopping the critical loss of land and turning this trend around is critical for the future prosperity and security of humankind. The Sustainable Development Goal 15 “Life on land” commits world leaders to work together to achieve land degradation neutrality (LDN) for safeguarding life on land. One of the objectives that comprises LDN is to reinforce responsible governance of land tenure.

The protection of fertile soils is a precondition for sustainable development. In the final document of the conference of the United Nations on sustainable development in June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro (Rio+20 Conference), the international community thus agreed to strive for a “land degradation neutral world”. The legal study by Ecologic Institute, Berlin, firstly scrutinizes some national legislation (Germany/EU, USA and Brazil) in order to identify legal instruments which are suitable for the implementation of the goal of a “land degradation neutral world”.

About 88% of the population is concentrated in the highlands, which constitute less than half of the national territory; here the population density is 141 persons km-2. Agriculture is the main source of livelihood and national income in the country. Over 85% of the population directly depends on it and about half of the GDP is generated from the sector. However, agriculture is small-scale and subsistence oriented, and it is in a very low state of development.

Desertification, land degradation and drought affect more than 2 billion people and the situation might worsen due to the unsustainable use of soil and water under present scenarios of climate change. The UNCCD 10-year strategy points out the importance of science, knowledge sharing systems and awareness raising to support policymakers in reversing this trend. Sustainable land management practices, including sustainable agriculture, provide important local, regional and global benefits.

Numbers can tell a compelling story. In this brochure, the numbers highlight how much we rely on productive land. Amongst other valuable services, land feeds our families, provides fresh water and powers our future ambitions. Much of the data collected here, however, demonstrate how close we are to pushing our relationship with the land to breaking point. The magnitude of the challenges and potential consequences of failing to implement bold action on land and soil, in terms of future social stability and economic development, should not be underestimated.

Human activities are the principal drivers of the processes of land degradation, desertification and climate change. Though highly complex and difficult to predict, interactions between climate change and land degradation are likely to affect a range of different ecosystem functions and the services they deliver, with consequent impacts on food production, livelihoods and human well-being. Society must therefore mitigate or reverse these stresses through innovative approaches.

Land has many uses. It provides water, food and energy. It is used to create wealth and employment and grow economies. And it provides other, often less obvious and tangible, services such as conserving biodiversity, storing carbon, purifying and storing water. It even regulates the Earth’s climate, for instance, by absorbing the heat from the sun. All of its uses are undermined and destroyed when land is degraded. Degrading the land disrupts these functions and leads to severe food, water and energy shortages.

Land degradation neutrality (LDN) is achieved if land degradation is avoided or reduced, and new degradation is balanced by reversing degradation elsewhere in the same land type through restoration or rehabilitation. The primary instrument for avoiding and reducing degradation is the application of sustainable land management (SLM) approaches and technologies. Because of its multifunctional roles and its sensitivity to land management, soil organic carbon (SOC) is one of the three global indicators for LDN, so predicting and monitoring change in SOC is vital to achieving LDN targets.