Land degradation is a serious impediment to improving rural livelihoods in Eastern Africa. This paper identifies major land degradation patterns and causes, and analyzes the determinants of sustainable land management (SLM) in three countries (Ethiopia, Malawi and Tanzania). The results show that land degradation hotspots cover about 51%, 41%, 23% and 23% of the terrestrial areas in Tanzania, M...

An approach to derive relationships for defining land degradation and desertification risk and developing appropriate tools for assessing the effectiveness of the various land management practices using indicators is presented in the present paper. In order to investigate which indicators are most effective in assessing the level of desertification risk, a total of 70 candidate indicators was s...

This article investigates the effects of wheat genetic diversity and land degradation on risk and agricultural productivity in less favoured production environments of a developing agricultural economy. Drawing production data from household and plot surveys conducted in the highlands of Ethiopia, we estimate a stochastic production function to evaluate the effects of variety richness, land deg...

a r t i c l e i n f o Land degradation in drylands is one of the major environmental issues of the 21st century particularly due to its impact on world food security and environmental quality. Climate change, shifts in vegetation composition, accelerated soil erosion processes, and disturbances have rendered these landscapes susceptible to rapid degradation that has important feedbacks on regio...

This paper provides an overview of linkages between the phenomena of land degradation and desertification and food insecurity. It reviews the basic concepts linked to food security and records main coping strategies, policy challenges and fields or action. It describes the approach taken by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (one of the three multilateral environmental agre...

A number of scientific methodologies have been used in assessing land degradation globally. However, the use of local knowledge in eliciting indicators of land degradation has seen little application by scientists and policy makers. Researchers believe the two approaches could complement each other to provide a holistic assessment of land degradation. The objective of the study was to find out ...

soil, a 3-dimensional component of the landscape, or simply a natural body in a soilscape with a given geopedological setting, was modeled by jenny as s = f (climate, organism, relief, parent material, time). to map such a complex body, the concept ‗pedon’ –the smallest volume that can be recognized as a soil had to be defined. classically, soil is known to function as provider, controller, reg...

This study aims to determine the accuracy level at which different forms of land degradation can be mapped from medium-resolution satellite data, and to assess how accurately degraded land can be detected from multi-temporal satellite images. Land degradation in the form of salinization and waterlogging in Tongyu County, western Jilin Province of Northeast China was mapped from Landsat TM and A...

Land provides a host of ecosystem services, of which the provisioning services are often considered paramount. As the demand for agricultural products multiplies, other ecosystem services are being degraded or lost entirely. Finding a sustainable trade-off between food production and one or more of other ecosystem services, given the variety of stakeholders, is a matter of optimizing land use i...