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?

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.

Desertification is a silent, invisible crisis that is destabilizing communities on a global scale. As the effects of climate change undermine livelihoods, inter-ethnic clashes are breaking out within and across states and fragile states are turning to militarization to control the situation.

The support plan for the Sahel is a regional approach to collectively address the root causes of disruptions such as poverty, migration and youth unemployment, climate change, insecurity, governance and institutional issues in the region. In this report an overview of the current situation for each of the priority areas of the UN Support Plan is presented to demonstrate that the full implementation of the plan could utilize an existing momentum of development not seen in decades in the Sahel.

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.

The food system challenges require simultaneous action across different sectors and concerted efforts of diverse players in food systems. While past efforts inclined towards boosting gricultural production, today’s focus has shifted to influencing transformative changes to the entire food systems continuum, from production and processing to marketing and distribution, using innovative solutions. Sub-Saharan Africa has been facing unprecedented challenges that affect the sustainability of food and agriculture systems, putting food and nutrition security at significant risk.