Sustainable Land Management (SLM) Practices in Drylands: How Do They Address Desertification Threats?

Managing land sustainably is a huge challenge, especially under harsh climatic conditions such as those found in drylands. The socio-economic situation can also pose challenges, as dryland regions are often characterized by remoteness, marginality, low-productive farming, weak institutions, and even conflict. With threats from climate change, disputes over water, competing claims on land, and migration increasing worldwide, the demands for sustainable land management (SLM) measures will only increase in the future. Within the EU-funded DESIRE project, researchers and stakeholders jointly identified existing SLM technologies and approaches in 17 dryland study sites located in the Mediterranean and around the world. In order to evaluate and share this valuable SLM experience, local researchers documented the SLM technologies and approaches in collaboration with land users, utilizing the internationally recognized WOCAT questionnaires. This article provides an analysis of 30 technologies and 8 approaches, enabling an initial evaluation of how SLM addresses prevalent dryland threats, such as water scarcity, soil degradation, vegetation degradation and low production, climate change, resource use conflicts, and migration. Among the impacts attributed to the documented technologies, those mentioned most were diversified and enhanced production and better management of water and soil degradation, whether through water harvesting, improving soil moisture, or reducing runoff. Favorable local-scale cost–benefit relationships were mainly found when considered over the long term. Nevertheless, SLM was found to improve people’s livelihoods and prevent further outmigration. More field research is needed to reinforce expert assessments of SLM impacts and provide the necessary evidence-based rationale for investing in SLM.     

The expansion of tree-based boom crops in mainland Southeast Asia: 2001 to 2014

Over the past half century, countries of Mainland Southeast Asia (MSEA) – Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam – have witnessed increases in commercialized agriculture with rapid expansions of boom-crop plantations. We used MODIS EVI and SWIR time-series from 2001–2014 to classify tree-cover changes across MSEA and performed a supervised change detection using an upscaling approach by deriving samples from existing Landsat classifications. We used the random forest classifier and distinguished 24 classes (16 representing boom-crops) with an accuracy of 82.2%. Boom-crops occupy about 18% of the landscape (8% of which is rubber). Since 2003 74,960 km² of rubber have been planted; 70% of rubber is planted on former forest land, and 30% on low vegetation area (mainly former croplands). Timing, patterns of change, and deforestation rates, however, differ among the MSEA countries and the high spatial and temporal detail of our classification allowed us to quantify dynamics and discuss political and socio-economic drivers of change.     

Land cover dynamics in the Simien Mountains (Ethiopia), half a century after establishment of the National Park

Regional Environmental Change - The Simien Mountains house several endangered and endemic wildlife species and provide important ecosystem services. Despite its regional environmental importance,...