By 2050, the global population is expected to reach 9.7 billion, increasing demand for agricultural products, including food, feed, fiber, and fuel. About 25 percent of the world’s total land area has already been affected by land degradation.
Land degradation neutrality (LDN), a framework adopted under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), offers a pathway to reverse this trend. Environmental Defenders believes it must also protect the rights of the Indigenous and rural women who depend most on the land.
It is estimated that in the drylands, 12 million hectares of land become degraded through desertification every year. Globally, 1.5 billion people are affected by land degradation, especially rural communities, smallholder farmers, and the very poor. Some 70 percent of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.
Land and forest degradation threaten livelihoods, well-being, and food, water, and energy security, and increase the vulnerability of millions of people. Pressures on the world’s land resources are growing because of rising demand for food and agricultural commodities, in both quantity and quality, from a larger and more affluent global population; competition for productive land from biofuels, urban expansion, and other non-agricultural uses; stagnating or declining productivity as soil health deteriorates; weakened resilience of agricultural systems as biodiversity and ecosystem services are depleted; and natural factors such as climate variability and extreme weather events.
What Is Land Degradation Neutrality?
In 2015, the UNCCD adopted the concept of land degradation neutrality, which is also embedded in target 15.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals under Goal 15, Life on Land: “By 2030, combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil, including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation-neutral world.” More than 120 countries have committed to pursuing voluntary LDN targets.
The objectives of LDN are to:
- maintain or improve the sustainable delivery of ecosystem services;
- maintain or improve productivity in order to enhance food security;
- increase the resilience of the land and of the populations that depend on it;
- seek synergies with other social, economic, and environmental objectives; and
- reinforce responsible and inclusive governance of land.
The fundamental aim of LDN is to preserve the land resource base by ensuring no net loss of healthy and productive land at the national level. This goal can be achieved through a combination of measures that avoid, reduce, and reverse land degradation. Achieving LDN requires estimating the expected cumulative impacts of land use and land management decisions, and counterbalancing anticipated losses through strategically planned rehabilitation or restoration of degraded land within the same land type.
“A state whereby the amount and quality of land resources necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security remain stable or increase within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems.” — UNCCD definition of land degradation neutrality, Decision 3/COP.12, 2015
Land Degradation and Women’s Rights
Widespread and rapid land degradation threatens food production, water availability, biodiversity, and energy security worldwide. Land degradation contributes to climate change, deepens poverty, and drives displacement and migration, and those forces in turn worsen land degradation. As the UNCCD has documented, when land is degraded and usable land becomes scarce, women are uniquely and disproportionately affected because of their substantial role in agriculture and food production, their greater vulnerability to poverty, and their typically weaker legal protections and social status.
Women make up the majority of farmers in many of the regions most severely affected by desertification, land degradation, and drought. Nearly 80 percent of employed women in the least developed countries report agriculture as their primary source of livelihood, and women make up 43 percent of the world’s agricultural labor force. Although they often serve as environmental stewards, women tend to be excluded from participation and leadership in land conservation and management, lack access to agricultural extension services and institutional credit, and face barriers to taking part in development, planning, and policymaking. Compared with men, women often have less access to information, resources, and legal rights to land and other natural and productive resources. Unequal power relations and gender-based discrimination in legal and customary systems in many societies even deny women the right to plant trees, control soil degradation, and improve soil fertility.
Environmental Defenders’ Actions
For these reasons, Environmental Defenders supports land degradation neutrality, including through the conservation of forest ecosystems and the use of nature-based solutions as a defense against climate change, while promoting equitable governance, effective management, and positive conservation outcomes. We believe that accepted environmental and human rights principles embody everyone’s right to a secure, healthy, and ecologically sound environment, and that environmental degradation leads to violations of human rights, including the rights to life, health, and culture.
Through its biodiversity and climate program, Environmental Defenders contributes to LDN through:
- tree planting and reforestation, seed collection and banking, and biodiversity monitoring;
- land purchase and acquisition for reforestation, and the protection of wildlife and plants;
- documentation of environmental crimes, environmental education, and awareness campaigns;
- mobilizing rural communities to advocate and take direct action against illegal land sales and forced evictions carried out without their free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC);
- direct legal support, and the mapping and documentation of land rights violations;
- direct support to women land rights activists and environmental human rights defenders;
- creating opportunities for wildlife and people to coexist; and
- strengthening women’s land rights and access to resources, and improving the living conditions of Indigenous peoples affected by land and environmental degradation.