Rapidly expanding cities in very dry parts of the world must be turned into "green urban oases" to ensure they become both healthier places to live in and more resilient to climate change, according to this new report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
The Rangelands Atlas has been developed to document and raise awareness on the enormous environmental, economic and social value of rangelands as well as their different ecosystems. It highlights many of the changes taking place in rangelands due to climate change, land use and conversion trends, investments and other changes.
With climate change impacts already felt in the world’s drylands, there is an urgent need for action, at various scales and initiated by different stakeholders, to ensure the sustainability of food production and livelihoods in these regions in the coming decades.
Two decades ago, legal provisions gave local institutions rights to manage natural resources in four dryland African countries: Mali, Niger, Sudan and Ethiopia. This report examines how resilient such decentralised institutions have been, under the rapidly changing circumstances of the past two decades, and notes common lessons learned.
Drylands cover 41% of Earth’s surface and are the largest source of interannual variability in the global carbon sink. Drylands are projected to experience accelerated expansion over the next century, but the implications of this expansion on variability in gross primary production (GPP) remain elusive.
About 80% of forests in Ethiopia are dry forest. For the last 20 years they have been subject to land use changes, and replaced by agricultural land and settlements.
Pastoral livestock production is crucial to the livelihoods and the economy of Africa’s drylands. It developed 7 000 years ago in response to long‑term climate change. It spread throughout Northern Africa as an adaptation to the rapidly changing and increasingly unpredictable arid climate.
Alongside the global temperature goals of limiting global average warming to well below 2°C, and to make concerted efforts to limit warming to below 1.5°C, the Paris Agreement aims to collectively enhance adaptation, build resilience to climate change, promote low carbon development and ensure that finance flows are provided to support these eff
