The World Bank is pleased to announce the 17th Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty from March 14 to 18, 2016 at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington D.C. The conference theme will be: Scaling up Responsible Land Governance.

Now in its 17th year, the annual World Bank conference on land and poverty brings together key stakeholders from governments, civil society, academia, the development community, and the private sector to discuss land policy design and implementation, impact evaluation and progress monitoring, and the latest research on these issues. This year’s conference will pay special attention to working at scale,...

very year on 17 June, the global community celebrates the World Day to Combat Desertification (WDCD). The theme of this year's WDCD is “Land Belongs to the Future - Let’s Climate Proof It” and focuses on ecosystem-based adaptation in order to i) increase the attention given to land and soil within climate change adaptation; ii) mobilize support for sustainable land management (SLM); and iii) call for the inclusion of land and soil and their significance to food security into national climate change adaptation policies.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the UNCCD institutions, as well as...