This brochure presents FAO’s work on mainstreaming biodiversity as a cross-cutting theme in the agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors. It provides examples of on-the-ground activities and highlights relevant international mechanisms. It shows how biodiversity and ecosystems benefit people in countless ways by providing food, clean water, shelter and raw materials for our basic needs.

There is today a growing awareness of the importance of providing rural populations with more secure tenure to land and other natural resources, not least in Africa where approximately 90 percent of all land is still unregistered. At the same time there has been a rethinking of approaches for securing local tenure rights in practice.

The Community Land Value Chain (CaVaTeCo in Portuguese) is an approach that can improve tenure security and management of community lands and natural resources in the context of large-scale land investments.

This study draws on some case studies of land reforms in different South Asian countries.

Women disproportionately bear the negative impacts of large-scale land investments (in agribusiness, extractives, logging) in the global South.

The FAO Technical Workshop on “Best-practices for the implementation and reporting of SDG indicator 14.4.1 – Percentage of biologically sustainable fish stocks” was held in Rome, Italy, from 21 to 24 November 2017.

The Miombo woodland is a vast African dryland forest ecosystem covering close to 2.7 million km2 across southern Africa (Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe). The woodlands are characterized by the dominance of Brachystegia species, either alone or in association with Julbernardia and Isoberlinia species.

Across Africa, Asia and Latin America, investors are increasingly approaching rural communities seeking land for logging, mining, and agribusiness ventures.