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Land, soil and water

Practices and decision-making

© FAO / Guram Saqvarelidze

Sustainable land management (SLM) requires informed decision-making and the application of practices adapted to local biophysical and socio-economic conditions. FAO supports countries in assessing  land degradation, identifying suitable SLM practices and scaling up their adoption to improve land productivity, restore ecosystems and strengthen resilience.


A sustainable land management decision support framework (DSF) has been co‑designed by 15 countries (Argentina, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Colombia, Ecuador, Lesotho, Morocco, Nigeria, Panama, the Philippines, Thailand, Tunisia, Türkiye, and Uzbekistan), multiple partners, including WOCAT, and FAO under a GEF-funded project. The DSF helps to bridge the assessments on land degradation (done at multiple levels) with efforts to foster the adoption of SLM. To this end, the DSF guides countries through the process of evidence-based decision-making for SLM, from the national to the local level, following seven modules with proposed tools and methods.

The innovativeness of the DSF lies in its flexibility to adapt and respond to countries' needs, its applicability at different scales and through different entry points through its modularity, its consideration of knowledge management as part of the process, and its participatory, multisectoral and multidisciplinary approach.

Sustainable land management comprises measures and practices adapted to biophysical and socioeconomic conditions aimed at the protection, conservation and sustainable use of resources (soil, water and biodiversity) and the restoration of degraded natural resources and their ecosystem functions. 

Land resource planning and the systematic assessment of land potential and degradation are needed to help land users select, adapt and mobilize SLM options (biological, agronomic and structural) into practice in an integrated way on a given farm or wider landscape, with the aim of maintaining productivity and restoring degraded land.  

The selection of appropriate SLM practices and approaches represents an important step in ensuring the effectiveness of land management and restoration.

A common question is: For a certain set of biophysical and socioeconomic conditions, what are the best technologies or practices that farmers and other land users can introduce to prevent degradation or restore degraded land?

Reliable information is required to answer this question effectively, and sources of such information include:  

There is considerable accumulated experience on SLM practices, many of which have been tested and fine-tuned to produce packages of best practices for the sustainable management of land and water. Technologies or approaches may also not affect everyone in the same way, so WOCAT has developed new modules to measure gender responsiveness in technology and approaches as well as modules to analyse possible tenure bottlenecks.  

To foster the uptake and adoption of SLM, FAO is promoting a holistic process that includes providing technical options suitable for different socioeconomic and environmental conditions, which helps overcome policy and institutional barriers to enable successful scaling-up.

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