July 2011: The latest issue of UNCCD News reports on global efforts to preserve genetic resources, foster crop diversity, and Africa’s Nerica rice, among other topics.

UNCCD News is published by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Issue 3.2 includes several stories about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. In his introduction to the issue, UNCCD Executive Secretary Luc Gnacadja writes that “Our link to Svalbard is that much of this crop diversity originated in the dry plains and grasslands that cover one-third of the world’s terrestrial surface.” He further stresses that “a key factor of the Convention’s success is the resilience of food crops in the face of climate change, so we hold a major stake in the adaptability of smallholder farmers and the ongoing efforts to strengthen and protect the world’s growing network of seed banks, especially the hard-pressed, under-funded in situ operators at national level.”

This issue also includes a profile of the research project named “DESIRE.” It indicates that this EU-funded research project builds on earlier research foundations developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN’s (FAO) Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands (LADA), the World Overview of Conservation Approaches and Technologies (WOCAT) programme and the Dryland Development Paradigm (DDP), together with the DIS4ME Desertification Indicator System for Mediterranean Europe and the Pan-European Soil Erosion Assessment (PESERA) model. It seeks to generate guidelines for sustainable land management (SLM) in the drylands for a variety of audiences, from farmers to decision makers in ministries and international organisations. [Publication: UNCCD News Issue 3.2]