Sustainable development of the natural landscape has received an increasing attention worldwide. Identifying the causes of land degradation is the primary condition for adopting appropriate methods to preserve degraded landscapes.

In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Sustainable Development Goals. In 2019, the release of the global assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services unfortunately demonstrated that our planet may be in more trouble than expected.

Gully erosion is the destructive and dramatic form of land degradation in Northeast China. The region is the grain production and ecological security base of China where the fertile and productive Mollisols are distributed. Though the region was agriculturally developed relatively recently, it went through high intensity cultivation and fast succession processes within short-time scales.

Soil security identifies global challenges and a series of dimensions that are necessary requirements to meet those global challenges using sustainable land management. The soil security concept is applied to two contrasting soil landscape systems with varying climate, landform and soil types.

Land degradation is a multifaceted phenomenon. In many mountainous and hilly areas that are marginal in terms of their economic and social sustainability, degradation is closely linked to population decline through ageing and outmigration, and to the abandonment of land, leading to a loss of community resilience.

The results of the research conducted on the subject of regeneration of areas of land suffering degradation were presented, studied and analyzed to establish “families” of causes and effects, to forecast lines of action commensurate with the reversibility of the damage.

The quality of cultivated land has been seriously degraded due to the overuse of chemical fertilizer in China. Land conservation technologies (LCTs) have been proven to effectively address land degradation and improve land productivity.

Labour migration in Nepal is having profound effects on land management. We take two examples from the hills of Nepal where the increasing trend in outmigration continues unabated and explore its consequences. The purpose of this study is to understand the impacts of the subsequent labour shortage on land management and how it affects households.

The dramatic growth of the world’s population is increasing the pressure on natural resources, particularly on soil systems. At the same time, inappropriate agricultural practices are causing widespread soil degradation.

Global climate change and its influence on human migration have caused heated debates. There is no consensus about the role of environmental change in shaping migration decisions.

Agroforestry represents a solution to land degradation by agriculture, but social barriers to wider application of agroforestry persist. More than half of all cropland in the USA is leased rather than owner-operated, and the short terms of most leases preclude agroforestry.

The increasingly serious problem of land degradation has a direct impact on the ecosystem and sustainable development in Mongolia. The influence of land degradation on the main China–Mongolia–Russia traffic arteries is currently unclear and poses a risk to the construction of transportation infrastructure.