Land Use

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA 2005) reports on an increasingly serious degradation of natural resources and the ecosystems that depend on them, threatening ecosystem goods and the services they provide. It is estimated by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) that over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and up to one billion may be at risk. Understanding land degradation and its drivers is not only a major challenge for science, but also a prerequisite for designing policies and actions to alter the course of events or temper their effects. Proper land management or reclamation is not a task for land managers or soil specialists alone. It also requires a policy environment that supports sustainable changes in land use, e.g. reliable tenure and property rights on land and water. These should provide incentives for farmers to invest in improving the productivity of land and water, thus allowing them to continue living off the land without destroying it. It is at this point that trans-disciplinarity, becomes a "must". ZEF has gained first-hand experience with these problems in its research projects in South America, Central Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. Evidence from these projects points out that the drivers of land degradation are both bio-physical and socio-economic in nature. Sound policies for mitigation or adaptation to land degradation are often lacking. Such measures, which should internalize the external costs caused by degradation, need to be adapted locally. In sub-Saharan Africa, combating land degradation means empowering the people by land tenure and knowledge generation for better resource use. In the transition economies of the former Soviet Union, it also entails carefully introducing market-oriented agricultural production schemes.