Overcoming One of the Greatest Environmental Challenges of Our Times: Re-thinking Policies to Cope with Desertification

What are the policy challenges posed by desertification? This paper highlights a range of new and innovative options available to policymakers to achieve sustainable land management, combat desertification and reduce poverty. It finds that many new approaches have been identified by communities, researchers and decision-makers at various levels, and incorporated into current strategies, tovarying degrees. The authors point out that viewing accumulated experience, exploring transferable lessons and debating new options are activities that could be more frequently incorporated into policy processes at all levels under the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The authors find that many challenges remain for the effective mainstreaming of desertification policies within the context of larger social and economic development policies. These include: societal solutions, including economic incentives, to combat desertification are not always considered scientists do not play a strong enough role in defining public policies existing policies on land tenureinteract poorly with economic development policies, which are further exacerbated by adverse subsidies and inappropriate incentives international influences on national mainstreaming, particularly in the form of development aid, are typically notappropriate to the needs of the dryland peoples Factors highlighted in the paper include: governments can harness investments in sustainable land management through the reorientation of existing institutions improving the awareness of national factors impinging at the local scale can be important for populations at the community level coordination at the regional level makes sense because problems and solutions are often similar or shared in Latin America, policies to combat desertification have been deployed at the national level, limiting any substantial benefits to be gained from regional synchronisation in West Asia, a relatively strong organisational arrangement is in place to address desertification as an economic and social issue across the West Asian region in Africa, continent-wide strategies give significant recognition to desertification as a key factor affecting African development.