Sustainable Land Management Sourcebook

Front Cover
World Bank Publications, Jun 17, 2008 - Political Science - 212 pages
Policies promoting pro-poor agricultural growth are the key to helping countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals especially the goal of halving poverty and hunger by 2015. The public sector, private sector, and civil society organizations are working to enhance productivity and competitiveness of the agricultural sector to reduce rural poverty and sustain the natural resource base. The pathways involve participation by rural communities, science and technology, knowledge generation and further learning, capacity enhancement, and institution building. Sustainable land management (SLM) an essential component of such policies will help to ensure the productivity of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and hydrology. SLM will also support a range of ecosystem services on which agriculture depends. The 'Sustainable Land Management Sourcebook' provides a knowledge repository of tested practices and innovative resource management approaches that are currently being tested. The diverse menu of options represents the current state of the art of good land management practices. Section one identifies the need and scope for SLM and food production in relation to cross-sector issues such as freshwater and forest resources, regional climate and air quality, and interactions with biodiversity conservation and increasingly valuable ecosystem services. Section two categorizes the diversity of land management systems globally and the strategies for improving household livelihoods in each system type. Section three presents a range of investment notes that summarize good practice, as well as innovative activity profiles that highlight design of successful or innovative investments. Section four identifies easy-to-access, Web-based resources relevant for land and natural resource managers. The 'Sourcebook' is a living document that will be periodically updated and expanded as new material and findings become available on good land management practices. This book will be of interest to project managers and practitioners working to enhance land and natural resource management in developing countries.

From inside the book

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 6 - Phelleus were full of rich earth, and there was abundance of wood in the mountains. Of this last the traces still remain, for although some of the mountains now only afford sustenance to bees, not so very long ago there were still to be seen roofs of timber cut from trees growing there, which were of a size sufficient to cover the largest houses; and there were many other high trees cultivated by man and bearing abundance of food for cattle. Moreover, the land reaped the benefit of the annual rainfall,...
Page 6 - Of this last the traces still remain, for although some of the mountains now only afford sustenance to bees, not so very long ago there were still to be seen roofs of timber cut from trees growing there, which were of a size sufficient to cover the largest houses; and there were many other high trees, cultivated by man and bearing abundance of food for cattle. Moreover, the land reaped the benefit of the annual rainfall, not as now losing the water which flows off the bare earth into the sea, but,...
Page 4 - An ecosystem is a dynamic complex of plant, animal, and microorganism communities and the nonliving environment interacting as a functional unit. The MA deals with the full range of ecosystems— from those relatively undisturbed, such as natural forests, to landscapes with mixed patterns of human use and to ecosystems intensively managed and modified by humans, such as agricultural land and urban areas. Ecosystem services are the benefits people...
Page 6 - The consequence is, that in comparison of what then was, there are remaining in small islets only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called ; all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the country being left.
Page 19 - Foley, JA, R. DeFries, GP Asner, C. Barford, G. Bonan, SR Carpenter, FS Chapin, MT Coe, GC Daily, HK Gibbs, JH Helkowski, T. Holloway, EA Howard, CJ Kucharik, C. Monfreda, JA Patz, IC Prentice, N. Ramankutty and PK Snyder. 2005. Global consequences of land use.
Page 164 - A hydrocarbon that is a greenhouse gas produced through anaerobic (without oxygen) decomposition of waste in landfills, animal digestion, decomposition of animal wastes, production and distribution of natural gas and oil, coal production, and incomplete fossil fuel combustion.
Page 162 - Climate change" means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.
Page 17 - ... current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs
Page 40 - ... categories, ranging from agroforests to grasslands and pastures. The criteria for evaluating the ecosystem services may be finetuned for specific locations, but the matrix always comprises indicators for the following: • two major global environmental concerns on regulating services of ecosystems — carbon storage and biodiversity; • agronomic sustainability, assessed according to a range of soil ecosystem services, including trends in nutrient cycling and organic matter over time; • smallholders...
Page 41 - ... most commonly practiced pasture-livestock system, which occupies the vast majority of converted forest area, is profitable for smallholders but entails huge carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. Systems that are preferable from an environmental point of view, such as coffee combined with bandana (a fast-growing timber tree), can pay better, but have prohibitively high start-up costs and labor requirements and are riskier for farmers. An alternative pasture-livestock system, in which farmers...

Bibliographic information