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Science for Improving the Monitoring and Assessment of Dryland Degradation

OAR@ICRISAT

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Relation http://oar.icrisat.org/7/
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/ldr.1044
 
Title Science for Improving the Monitoring and Assessment of
Dryland Degradation
 
Creator Winslow, M D
Vogt, J V
Thomas, R J
Sommer, S
Martius, C
Akhtar-Schuster, M
 
Subject Land degradation
 
Description The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) commissioned its First Scientific Conference in 2009 to deliberate on
ways to improve the global monitoring and assessment of dryland degradation to support decision-making in land and water management. The
papers included in this issue of Land Degradation & Development elaborate the reasoning behind the 11 recommendations that emerged from
the Conference and were formally submitted to the UNCCD. These papers argue for a more holistic, harmonised and integrated approach to
dryland monitoring and assessment, and describe scientific and institutional approaches for achieving this goal. A central challenge is to
integrate human/social with environmental observations in accordance with the Convention’s view that the interactions and tradeoffs between
human development needs and land condition must be considered. A global monitoring and assessment regime should be established to gather
and analyse relevant data on a routine basis, allowing locally-relevant indicators to be aggregated into meaningful classes appropriate to
different decision-making levels. The underlying forces that cause changes in land condition should also be monitored and assessed so that
remedial actions can target the true causes of dryland degradation, including social, economic, policy, institutional and knowledge drivers that
have often been overlooked in the past. Monitoring and assessment should hybridise differing types of knowledge generated by different
stakeholders in order to strengthen collective capacities to combat dryland degradation. An independent scientific advisory mechanism should
be created to advise the UNCCD about the results emerging from the monitoring and assessment regime in order to improve decision-making.
 
Publisher John Wiley & Sons
 
Date 2011
 
Type Article
PeerReviewed
 
Format application/pdf
 
Language en
 
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Identifier http://oar.icrisat.org/7/1/mark1.pdf
Winslow, M D and Vogt, J V and Thomas, R J and Sommer, S and Martius, C and Akhtar-Schuster, M (2011) Science for Improving the Monitoring and Assessment of Dryland Degradation. Land Degradation & Development, 22. pp. 145-149. ISSN 1085-3278