The Great Green Wall is one of the main vehicles for delivering the Sustainable Development Goals and the Rio conventions in the Sahel. Biodiversity is the foundation of the Great Green Wall in many ways, determining soil productivity and water cycles and providing the foundation for risk management and resilient ecosystems. The Great Green Wall can make a major contribution to achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Meeting the Sustainable Development Goals requires drylands sustainability. Treating drylands as global environmental commons enables better tailored governance responses. Key nested governance elements for drylands involve setting goals, monitoring and delivering sanctions across scales. The present global governance system for drylands only partially delivers these elements. Drylands require a particular focus on linking local and global governance.

In the past decades, debates on agriculture, land use and management of natural resources have coined a wealth of new terms. In many cases, these are in full vogue for just a period, replace older ones or are used for political reasons. Meanwhile, there are so many terms that it is difficult to keep track and distinguish them from each other.

The 2019 edition of the Land for Life Award puts the spotlight on individuals and organizations that made outstanding contributions to achieve land degradation neutrality on a large scale, with long-term changes and dedicated actions for 25 years or longer. Those remarkable projects involve local people, communities and the society, raising the level of their ambition. Meanwhile, recent assessments remind us that two billion hectares of land are now degraded worldwide. This represents an area larger than the territory of the Russian Federation, the biggest country in the world.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the popular perception of rangelands and their management is that these vast areas have major problems without solutions: the common narrative focuses on overgrazing, herds of undernourished livestock, erosion and desertification, drought, famine, and conflict.

However, evidence compiled and analysed in this book show that such a view of rangelands – as being unproductive and mismanaged systems – does not reflect reality. It needs reconsideration and revision.

Two billion hectares of productive land are degraded worldwide. This is an area larger than South America or twice the size of China, and 500 million hectares of this is abandoned agricultural land. We continue to degrade another 12 million hectares of productive land every year. We need to break this destructive cycle because the benefits of preventing land degradation and reversing it are far greater than the gains from degrading new land year after year.

The remit of this paper is to identify and examine “success” stories in combating desertification.

The desertification is described as the land degradation occurring as a result of climate change and human activities in arid, semi-arid and semi-humid areas. In today’s world, climate change, desertification, land degradation and drought are amongst the most critical issues as they affect over 4 billion hectares of land in more than 164 countries, and directly impact approximately 1.5 billion people. These hazards threaten not only the environment, but also economy, security, development, food security and social life in Turkey as well as around the globe.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its Climate Change and Land: An IPCC Special Report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems in 2019 (www.ipcc.ch/srccl). We refer to the IPCC’s report in short here as the Special Report on Climate Change and Land. The Special Report was a response to proposals from governments and observer organisations to the IPCC.

Established in 1994, the United Nations to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is the sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management. The Convention addresses specifically the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, known as the drylands, where some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and peoples can be found.

Established in 1994, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) is the sole legally binding international agreement linking environment and development to sustainable land management. The Convention addresses specifically the arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, known as the drylands, where some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and peoples can be found.

Vast swathes of land, from Africa to the Middle East, are being left useless by climate shifts and human pressures such as deforestation, mining and farming, threatening to hike migration and conflict. The accelerating damage could cost the global economy a staggering $23 trillion by 2050 - and rich countries as well as poor will pay the price.

Interview with Ibrahim Thiaw