Agriculture influences and shapes the world’s ecosystems, but not always in a positive way. More than 2.5 billion people are globally involved as stewards of land and water ecosystems that constitute the natural resource base for feeding the current and future world population. Yet, conventional agronomic interventions based on ‘hard’ agricultural engineering compromise various eco-services that are required for sustainable agricultural development.

Only if there is a fundamental change in the way we manage land can we reach the targets of climate-change mitigation, avert the dramatic loss of biodiversity and make the global food system sustainable. The WBGU proposes five multiple-benefit strategies illustrating ways of overcoming competition between rival claims to the use of land. These should be promoted by five governance strategies, especially by setting suitable framework conditions, reorienting EU policy and establishing alliances of like-minded states.

Global food security and agricultural land management represent two urgent and intimately related challenges that humans must face. The authors quantify the changes in the global agricultural land footprint if the world were to adhere to the dietary guidelines put forth by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), while accounting for the land use change incurred by import/export required to meet those guidelines. The authors analyze data at country, continental, and global levels.

This report examines the role of European Union (EU) member States, both collectively and individually, in the current reported wave of foreign land investment in Africa that has led to the current use of the term ‘land grabbing’.It discusses whether this role is consistent with the EU’s commitment to advance agriculture in Africa in order to help achieve the Millennium Development Goals and member states’ obligations under international human rights law.

Land degradation is becoming a serious environmental issue threatening fertile agricultural soils and other natural resources. There are many driving forces behind land degradation. The expansion of artificial surfaces due to various economic activities, such as housing, industry, and transport infrastructure, known as soil sealing, constitutes one of the most intensive forms of land degradation in urban regions. Measures to halt and reverse land degradation require both strong land-use management policies, as well as effective spatial planning mechanisms.

In the last ten years or so, the global interest in, and concerns about, the issue of how the world shall provide a growing population with sufficient food, bioenergy and wood raw material has attracted increasing attention. Will land and water resources be enough, how shall they be best managed to achieve increased production and productivity without causing far-reaching negative environmental and social side-effects, will climate change make solutions more difficult, will there be financial means and know-how available to address all challenges and opportunities?

This infographic builds on the Regional Dialogue on Women’s Inclusion in Landscape Management,
organized by WOCAN in partnership with RECOFTC and The Forests Dialogue, 7-9 Oct. 2014, Thailand

This report explores how the management of land-based biomass production and consumption can be developed towards a higher degree of sustainability across different scales: from the sustainable management of soils on the field to the sustainable management of global land use as a whole. Under business as usual conditions, the growing demand for food and non-food biomass could lead to a gross expansion of cropland in the range of 320 to 850 million hectares by 2050.

The land use sector represents almost 25% of total global emissions. These emissions can be reduced. There is also great potential for carbon sequestration through the scaling up, and scaling out, of proven and effective practices. Improved land use and management, such as low-emissions agriculture, agro-forestry and ecosystem conservation and restoration could, under certain circumstances, further reduce the remaining emissions gap by up to 25%. These climate-smart land management practices nearly always come with adaptation co-benefits.

The UNEP foresight report contains a description of the 21 emerging environmental issues identified through the UNEP Foresight Process. The process resulted in a list of 21 emerging environmental issues tagged 21 Issues for the 21st Century covering the major themes of the global environment including food, land, freshwater, marine, biodiversity, climate change, energy, waste, and technology, as well important cross-cutting issues ranging from the need for better environmental governance, to the need for human behavioral change towards the environment.

Valuations of tenure rights are required by the State and by the private sector for a wide variety of reasons, often forming and informing the basis of transactions, taxation, compensation and accounting. Value and the valuation process form a part of our everyday lives, and yet these are often shrouded in mystery and are not clearly understood.

This report suggests that a new and explicit goal of sustainable development to be agreed as a result of Rio+20 should be the reduction of the rate of land degradation to achieve land degradation neutrality, which we refer to as “Zero Net Land Degradation” or ZNLD.