August 2014: The Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has released summaries from recent meetings of the Convention’s Inter-Governmental Working Group (IWG) on the follow-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20) and a regional conference on the economics of land degradation.

The second meeting of the IWG took place from 16-18 July 2014, in Beijing, China. The meeting was opened by China’s new UNCCD National Focal Point, Pan Yingzhen. UNCCD Executive Secretary, Monique Barbut, urged the IWG to make progress on defining the concept of land degradation neutrality (LDN) and identifying options to achieve its implementation at the national level. Barron Orr, University of Arizona, stressed that practical monitoring and evaluation tools will be required to measure progress.

The IWG members discussed the work of three task forces, which are considering the definition of LDN, options for Parties that wish to achieve LDN, and the implications for the Convention’s current and future strategy, programmes and the resource requirements.

Based on the Co-Chairs’ and a majority of IWG members’ agreement, the IWG’s interim working papers will be sent to all Parties, civil society organizations (CSOs) and observers with a request for comments by the end of October 2014. Revised working papers are expected to be made available to IWG members in January 2015, and will be discussed at the third meeting of the IWG in March 2015.

A regional conference on the ‘Economics of Land Degradation’ (ELD) convened in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, from 1-2 August 2014. The conference was organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan, the Ministry of Nature Protection, Turkmenistan, and the UNCCD Secretariat.

Approximately 100 participants from the Central Asian region shared their experiences and considered how the economic valuation of ecosystem services applied in their countries. Participants also discussed a proposal for a sub-regional ELD case study and the next steps in the organization of a second phase of the Central Asian Countries Initiative for Land Management (CACILM) project. Participants agreed to propose a launch of an ELD regional research project in collaboration with the UNCCD focal points.

In other UNCCD news, the report of the first meeting of the Science-Policy Interface (SPI) has been released. At that meeting, which was co-chaired by the Chair of the Committee on Science and Technology (CST), Uriel Safriel (Israel), Barron J. Orr (US) was appointed rapporteur and Mariam Akhtar-Schuster (Germany) was elected as Co-Chair. [UNCCD News Release on IWG Meeting] [UNCCD News Release on Regional ELD Meeting] [Report of the First Meeting of the SPI] [Land Policy & Practice coverage on CACILM]