SLM Issues
Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change
Climate change has the potential to undermine Africa’s economic development, increasing poverty and delaying or preventing the realization of the Millennium Development Goals. Land degradation threatens the environment, food security and development progress. While the annual population growth rate in Sub-Saharan Africa is at over two percent, agricultural productivity gains have been marginal over the past decades, and natural resources degradation has increased significantly.
Sustainable Land Management (SLM) has the potential to mitigate climate change and strengthen the resilience to its impacts, while advancing broader development objectives, such as poverty alleviation and economic growth, food security and environmental health. The dynamic nature of climate change should be taken into account in order to ensure that land management practices indeed meet the sustainability criterion.
TerrAfrica Climate Briefs provide accurate and relevant information about the issues and challenges related to the Land and Climate nexus.
TerrAfrica Climate Brief No.1: SLM in Africa, Opportunities for Climate Change Adaptation
According to the briefs, SLM:
- Diversifies food sources and livelihood options.
- Conserves soil and water.
- Adapts livestock grazing to the changing climate.
- Increases carbon storage in soil.
- Uses trees and other perennials that stores carbon on farms.
- Sequesters carbon while restoring degraded lands and watersheds.
SLM and Climate Change: An Interactive Discussion
TerrAfrica partners sponsored an online debate that ran parallel to the UNCCD COP 9 to share ideas about how sustainable land management technologies can combat the challenges caused by climate change in Sub-Saharan Africa.
To read the discussion and learn more about SLM and the guest experts, please visit: http://www.slmdiscussion.org/
Sustainable Land Management and Food Security
Rising food prices are causing severe hardship for poor and vulnerable people throughout the world. Between 2005 and 2008, world prices of rice, wheat and maize more than doubled, pushing more than 100 million people into poverty, including nearly 30 million people in Africa.
The causes of the food price crisis include many factors affecting the global supply, demand and trade of food commodities. Land degradation is one of the important medium to longer term factors directly affecting food prices, coupled with low investments in agricultural research. Sustainable land management approaches can help countries in Sub-Saharan Africa reduce their vulnerability to food price increases.
This issue paper investigates the linkages among food prices, land degradation, and land management in Sub-Saharan Africa