Across vast areas of the world, human activity has degraded once fertile and productive land. Deforestation, overgrazing, continuous farming and poor irrigation practices have affected almost 2 billion hectares worldwide, threatening the health and livelihoods of over one billion people. In this edition of New Agriculturist, a collection of articles explores some of the approaches and policies that can help to successfully rehabilitate degraded land.

Following from the Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture project, this book examines the relationships and linkages between land use and water management and social systems. Given that agriculture is the largest economic sector in many developing countries, this volume provides innovative ideas for the prevention of land degradation and for improving the sustainability of food production in the developing world.

Divided into three parts, this collaborative work looks at the varied challenges brought about as a result of corruption in the water sector. It also looks at recent research conducted and provides an overview of the water sector corruption challenges in country profiles across the globe. Corruption in the water sector puts the lives and livelihoods of billions of people at risk. The onset of climate change and the increasing stress on water supply around the world make the fight against corruption in water more urgent than ever.

Forestry education in recent years has largely failed to adequately respond to the dynamics in forestry practice, the demands of the job market and the challenges of new global forestry paradigms.

This book examines the gender dimensions of natural resource exploitation and management, with a focus on Asia. It explores the uneasy negotiations between theory, policy, and practice that are often evident within the realm of gender, environment, and natural resource management. It offers a critical feminist perspective on gender relations and natural resource management in the context of contemporary policy concerns: decentralized governance, the elimination of poverty, and the mainstreaming of gender.The book is centred around three themes:

In 1992, a United Nations declaration proclaimed water as a human right. However, the water profession and the vast majority of governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region have not paid much attention.
This online book systematically analyses the legal development of the concept of water as a human right with particular reference to MENA countries. It considers:

The violence which followed the contested December 2007 Kenyan election was, arguably, an opportunity for historical grievances to be settled. This paper focuses on the land issue in regards to Kenya, asserting that land is a primary cause of conflcit in the country as it has been the crux of economic, cultural and socio-economic change.

Sahelian rural populations’ needs are sourced from on-farm indigenous tree species. However, access, use and management of indigenous tree species within their territories are restricted by forestry laws. This has built suspicion and discontent between foresters and natural resource users. Natural resource users argue that they own the trees on their farms; in contrast, the state claims to own protected indigenous trees on farms as stipulated in the forestry laws. These mismatches have served to increase deforestation despite stringent penalties and use of permits and licenses.

Secure land rights are important for development and poverty reduction and the greatest challenges for providing such rights are in urban, peri-urban areas, and the most productive rural areas. This publication updates and revises UN-HABITAT’s 2004 publication ‘Urban Land for All’, and stresses the need for policies that facilitate access to land for all sections of their existing and future populations – particularly those on low or irregular incomes.

Recent years have seen pastoralist communities in Tanzania becoming increasingly impoverished and vulnerable, due to  livestock diseases, drought, fluctuating market prices and unfavourable policies. This paper discusses strategies to address the last of these factors with reference to the Ereto-Ngorongoro Pastoralist Project, which was set up in response to growing concern about the unprecedented and rising levels of poverty among pastoralists in Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA).

Sierra Leone has recently emerged from a long period of political instability and civil war, and is ranked among the world’s poorest countries. Thousands of displaced people are in the process of returning totheir villages to rebuild their mainly farming-based livelihoods, and many are growing food crops for the first time in a decade.

This review seeks to assess the sustainable livelihoods projects currently supported by Norway in Malawi within the context of climate change and its predicted impact on agriculture development and food security.The report found that since the adaptation to climate change was not a design feature of any of the projects or undertakings, the relevance of the activities to adaptation to climate change was rather incidental.