UNDP’s support to countries on sustainable land management and restoration is designed to enhance livelihoods, secure food and water, build resilience and increase carbon storage and sequestration. Drawing on over 40 years of experience and expertise, UNDP assists countries to integrate land and related environmental concerns into national and sectoral development plans and strategies, secure resources, and implement programmes that advance inclusive, sustainable growth and development.

This publication supports processes related to rural communities’ resilience in implementing land restoration of the Great Green Wall Programme on the ground. It serves a dual purpose of consolidating biophysical operations and socio-economic assessments, and is mainly built on five-year interventions and practical experiences gathered through Action Against Desertification. The first part of the publication is a practical manual expressly created for stakeholders, partners, non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations.

These guidelines have been developed based on FAO’s and WOCAT’s extensive experience. The book draws, in particular, on WOCAT’s network and its database of SLM knowledge - as well as on WOC AT’s first overview book entitled ‘Where the land is greener’. These guidelines were implemented in the framework of the TerrAfrica partnership, whose main objective is to mainstream and upscale SLM in SSA, through the leveraging and harmonising of multisectoral investments at the local, country, subregional and regional levels.

The negative consequences of human actions have brought our world and our future to a dangerous crossroads: will we be able to avert the worst impacts of climate change? How can we stop and reverse the loss of fertile soil, biodiversity, and other natural capital that supplies all our food and other basic needs? Where are the jobs for millions of unemployed young people?

Many drylands in the world suffer problems of land degradation and desertification derived from human activities and exacerbated by drought. Too often these degradation processes have been endured by the ecosystems for a long time, and, according to forecasts of climate change, are likely to worsen in the future. Ecological restoration combined with adaptive management can be effective tools in response to this environmental and socioeconomic problem.

Almost one-quarter of the world’s land area has been degraded over the past 50 years because of soil erosion, salinization, peatland and wetland drainage, and forest degradation. The resulting damage, in terms of lost ecosystem goods and services, costs the world an estimated US$6.3 trillion a year. Almost a quarter of the world’s land area has been degraded over the past 50 years.
This is the result of soil erosion, salinization, peatland and wetland drainage, and forest degradation.

You cannot put a price tag on nature — but the economic numbers point to its protection,” said Anthony Waldron, the lead author of the report and researcher focused on conservation finance, global species loss and sustainable agriculture.

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 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification states on its website that 12 million hectares are lost annually to desertification and drought, and that more than 1.5 billion people are directly dependent on land that is being degraded, leading to US$42 billion in lost earnings each year.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development has developed a comprehensive work program that can help its members better understand risks linked to inaction and opportunities for action, structuring its work program around the international discussions led by the UNCCD on LDN. In particular LDN is reflected in the WBCSD’s Action2020 targets of “restoring at least 12 million hectares per year of degraded land”, and a business solution on “Restoring Degraded Land” has been developed to provide a response to land degradation challenges and the LDN target.

The 2020 Africa SDG Index and Dashboards Report provides an assessment of where African countries stand with respect to the SDGs and their progress toward the goals, with the additional lens of “leave no one behind.” The report also includes a preliminary analysis of the impact of COVID‑19 on the SDGs in Africa.

What’s the goal here? To sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, and halt biodiversity loss. Two billion hectares of land on Earth are degraded, affecting some 3.2 billion people, driving species to extinction and intensifying climate change. Goal 15: Life on land Human life depends on the earth as much as the ocean for our sustenance and livelihoods. Plant life provides 80 percent of the human diet, and we rely on agriculture as an important economic resources.

States of ecological maturity and temporal trends of drylands in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia north of 28 N are reported for 1998–2008. The input data were Normalized Difference Vegetation Index databases and corresponding climate fields, at a spatial resolution of 1 km and a temporal resolution of one month. States convey opposing dynamics of human exploitation and ecological succession. They were identified synchronically for the full period by comparing each location to all other locations in the study area under equivalent aridity.