January 2015: The inception meeting of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) Project, attended by 15 country delegates, took place from 14-16 January 2014 in Bonn, Germany. The project’s objective is to contribute towards implementing the outcomes of the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD or Rio+20), by providing the UNCCD with empirical evidence on the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the LDN goal.

According to recent studies by the UNCCD on the economics of land desertification, land degradation and drought, the cost of land degradation is currently estimated at about US$490 billion per year, much higher than the cost of action to prevent it. Roughly 40% of the world’s degraded land is found in areas with the highest incidence of poverty and directly impacts the health and livelihoods of an estimated 1.5 billion people. It is estimated that pursuing LDN actions aimed at preventing and/or reversing land degradation, for example through the adoption of sustainable land management (SLM) practices, could deliver up to US$1.4 trillion in increased crop production. Such actions also play a key role in climate change mitigation, through the quantities of CO2 emissions captured by healthy soils and supported ecosystems.

The LDN Project will work closely with the UNCCD Intergovernmental Working Group (IWG) to comprehensively investigate how SLM can contribute to land degradation neutrality, namely avoided land degradation and land rehabilitation. It is expected that this information will significantly assist UNCCD in convincing countries to take up the goal of LDN in their national policies, and to promote it further in the international arena. The project will also facilitate specific actions to investigate bottlenecks that prevent the adoption of sustainable land management policies and practices. [UNCCD Press Release] [Publication: Land Degradation Neutrality: Resilience at Local, National, and Regional Levels] [Publication: Background Document: The Economics of Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought:Methodologies and Analysis for Decision-Making] [Global Mechanism News]