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Tenure rights are crucial to the livelihoods of people as they define who can use which natural resources, for how long, and under which conditions. Tenure of natural resources is also essential for environmental sustainability and increased resilience and for enabling farmers to access other services. As the world population continues to grow and climate change reduces the availability of natural resources, increasing conflicts over land, and land deterioration are negatively affecting rural livelihoods on an unprecedented scale. In particular, women often have much weaker tenure rights than men, and they suffer discrimination by social customs, as well as by [...]

Since 2014, North Macedonia has developed into the flagship country for FAO support to land consolidation in Europe and Central Asia. The first small technical assistance project began in 2014. During 2017–2022, support to the national land consolidation programme was scaled up with European Union IPA funding through the FAO-implemented MAINLAND project. In August 2022, a second EU IPA-funded and FAO-implemented project “Enhancing land consolidation in North Macedonia” was launched and will continue until 2026 in close collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Water Economy. From the beginning, the Government of North Macedonia’s vision has been to build [...]

Global instruments such as the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT) and the Principles on Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems (CFS-RAI) endorsed by the Committee for World Food Security (CFS) provide critical guidance on responsible investments in land and forests to address global challenges of food insecurity, poverty, and inequality while supporting sustainable management of natural resources. Applying these global instruments to the assessment of concrete cases can help to identify better practice models for implementation. This document presents a review of selected [...]

The book of proceedings of the GSOIL4N contains the papers presented during the Global Symposium on Soils for Nutrition that was held from 26 to 29 July 2022. The papers provide the latest research findings and multisectoral insights which evidenced that nutrient imbalance is a global and crosscutting threat with multifactorial drivers and effects on the agrifood systems and even on key planetary processes.

This is a literature review on land use and integrated land use management systems in Uzbekistan. The review aims to synthesize and examine the state of knowledge and the scope for establishing various integrated resource and land use management strategies such as types of agroforestry systems and integrated pastoral management for the sustainable management of forest and agricultural resources in Uzbekistan. The review also aims to explore land use governance in Uzbekistan, delving into the governance structures, formal and informal institutions, their transformations, and path dependencies that shape the post-socialist realities for Uzbekistan. The report reflects upon the land use governance [...]

The dominance of insular, supply-side technocratic thinking has posed a major challenge to improving water governance in the face of mounting resource scarcity, which has itself been accentuated by climate change. During the 1990s, global discourse moved from supply-driven sectoral interventions to more holistic approaches to water governance as part of larger socioeconomic and environmental processes. Integrated water resources management (IWRM) emphasized demand-side water management and used prices, participation, entitlements, laws and regulations to strengthen water governance at hydrological rather than territorial units. More recently, there have been pleas for more integrative approaches that link land, water, energy, food, livelihoods, [...]

Réalisé conjointement par les secrétariats de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour l’alimentation et l’agriculture (FAO) et de la Convention des Nations Unies sur la lutte contre la désertification (CNULCD), avec la contribution de multiples parties prenantes, ce guide technique traite de l’intégration des Directives volontaires pour une gouvernance responsable des régimes fonciers applicables aux terres, aux pêches et aux forêts dans le contexte de la sécurité alimentaire nationale (DV) dans la mise en oeuvre de la CNULCD et de la neutralité de la dégradation des terres (NDT), ouvrant ainsi un nouveau chapitre dans les efforts en cours pour lutter contre [...]

The State of Land and Water Resources (SOLAW) in the Near East and North Africa (NENA) region is part of a FAO flagship series launched in 2011. Being one of the most land and water scarce region in the world, the preservation of land and water resources is of critical importance to ensure food security and address the increased food demand. The publication aims at providing policy makers, institutions and other stakeholders a comprehensive overview of the current situation for land and water and the effect of climate change and urbanization on food production facilitating informed decision-making. The report provides [...]

Trees in dryland forests and wooded areas provide key ecosystem services such as animal feed, timber, fruits and, regulation of soil and water cycles. Equally, the presence of livestock in dryland woody areas can also play an important role in the local ecosystem; not only are they a source of income for local communities, but they also help vegetation and mobilise stored biomass. When both of these ecosystem elements are wisely combined – livestock and trees – it creates an integrated agricultural system that can boost the local ecosystem, representing a welcome agro-ecological transition in livestock farming. The ‘Grazing with [...]

Mobility is a vital strategy employed by pastoralists to capitalize on the scarce availability of resources in variable environments, making pastoralism economically feasible and environmentally sustainable. Through mobility, pastoralists can produce animal-sourced products that provide food and income security to populations in the world’s rangelands. Such a practice also provides a range of benefits to the environment while fostering the capacity to adapt to changing social and natural environments. With a few exceptions, policies have largely not kept up with new scholarship and development discourse that acknowledges the importance of mobility to pastoralism. There is a lag in and resistance to [...]