March 2012: The Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has announced that it is organizing regional media workshops on land degradation, desertification and drought in the run up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20).

For the first workshop, the Secretariat is planning to sponsor up to 15 environmental journalists in a three-day workshop in Inner Mongolian province of China, including meetings with land experts and a field trip to showcase the challenges of land degradation and the best practices of combating it.

The workshops will seek to, inter alia, increase media coverage about the challenges of land degradation and best practices of sustainable land management, raise attention to the proposal to set a zero-net land degradation target, and build a community of journalists writing regularly about combating desertification, land degradation and mitigating the effects of drought. [UNCCD Press Release]