This episode of LandUP! addresses an emerging body of work on the nexus between land tenure and land degradation neutrality. Land degradation neutrality has been defined by the Parties to the Convention as a state whereby the amount and quality of land resources, necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security, remains stable or increases within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems.
Sustainable land governance is closely intertwined with achieving and enabling Land Degradation Neutrality. Findings show how secure tenure rights encourage landholders and users to invest in and commit to sustainable activities. Put simply, if land holders feel secure in their land holdings, they are more likely to take care of their land. They will not let it get degraded and this will take us one step closer to achieving Land Degradation Neutrality.
To take a deeper dive into the issues, we spoke to Professor of Geography at McGill University Dr. Jon Unruh, Country Program Manager for Benin at TMG Research Kader Baba, and Anne Hennings Researcher at the Land Portal.
June 17th 2022- Today marks #DesertificationAndDroughtDay and to highlight the occasion, the Land Portal, FAO and the UNCCD have come together to launch two new products; a portfolio and podcast, delving into the important relationship between land tenure and Land Degradation Neutrality.
One third of the world’s soils - including farmland, forests, rangelands, and urban land - are already degraded and it is estimated that this number could rise to almost 90% by 2050. Land Degradation occurs naturally, but research shows that land degradation is increasingly caused directly or indirectly by unsustainable human activities, notably deforestation, overgrazing, mining or intensive agriculture. This has driven biodiversity loss, desertification, and led to a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions.
This is the video of a specific side event at the UNCCD COP 15 that discusses the importance of land tenure rights to achieving land degradation neutrality. This session took place in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, on 12 May 2022.
The conceptual framework for Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) highlights that land degradation in developing countries impacts men and women differently, mainly due to unequal access to land, water, credit, extension services and technology. It further asserts that gender inequality plays a significant role in land-degradation-related poverty hence the need to address persistent gender inequalities that fuel women’s poverty in LDN interventions. This paper presents recommendations for moving towards a twin-agenda: gender equality and land degradation neutrality.
Women and men have unequal opportunities to address land degradation. While adoption of Sustainable Development Goal target 15.3 leads the world to ‘strive towards land degradation neutrality (LDN)’ by 2030, gender concerns are sparsely considered in LDN programming to date. To achieve LDN in regions with deeply entrenched socio‐cultural norms requires gender‐responsiveness, accounting for the varied gender components of land degradation.
Achieving land degradation neutrality (LDN) was adopted by countries in 2015 as one of the targets of the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As LDN is a relatively new concept there is an increasing need for evidence on the potential socio-economic and environmental benefits of LDN as well as how an enabling environment for implementing LDN measures can be developed.
Land degradation is a major global issue and achieving a land degradation-neutral world is one of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, striving for land degradation neutrality (LDN) is challenged by increasing claims on land resources and could result in major land use conflicts. The aim of this study is to demonstrate how LDN can be implemented in land system modelling and how achieving LDN alongside sufficient supplies of food, timber and shelter could affect future land system patterns, using the Republic of Turkey as a case study.