Increasing global demand for food and the need to address climate change risk make it ever more urgent to both protect ecosystems and use land more productively and efficiently. Brazil is a key player in this context and has made significant gains in recent decades.
Niger’s natural resource management policies and institutions in colonial and post-independence times have discouraged landowners to plant or protect trees. The consequent land clearing led to severe scarcity of tree products.
Senegal currently has a complex and poorly regulated system of land governance, which — combined with an urbanisation trend and increasing outsider interest — is leading to land privatisation and a consequent reduction in the availability of cultivable land for small producers.
With around one-third of the world’s arable land degraded, estimated annual losses of 6.3 to 10.6 USD trillion, and a projected need to increase food production from land by 70 percent by 2050, we simply cannot afford to neglect the loss of potential production from careless land management.
Healthy ecosystems provide vital services to society at multiple scales, ranging from local to global. Private landowners want to steward and enhance these ecosystem services, but they need the right information and support, as well the appropriate incentives.