Living Land

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of ecosystem services, and climate change mitigation and

adaptation. The majority of these projects (267) are imple-

mented in Africa, 162 in Asia, 132 in Latin America and

the Caribbean, 13 in the Middle East and seven in Europe.

Approximately 20 per cent of the funding has gone to 52

supra-regional projects.

As a signatory to UNCCD and as the host country of the

convention’s Secretariat, Germany is committed to support

the achievement of UNCCD’s objectives. We work closely

with the Secretariat on technical and political matters and

support the implementation of the 10-year strategy.

The inspirational target of land degradation neutrality

(LDN) was born out of the United Nations Conference on

Sustainable Development (Rio+20) and guides the formula-

tion of a target under the Sustainable Development Goals

(SDGs) and the post-2015 development agenda. The idea

behind this is to motivate all countries concerned by

the loss of ecosystem services through land degradation

to invest in maintenance and improvement of their land

resources. UNCCD has started preliminary work on imple-

menting LDN in a pilot project with 15 countries. Their

national action plans will be oriented towards the LDN

objectives. Germany is actively supporting this process in

two countries to assess at an early stage the implications

and necessary actions required for the LDN implementa-

tion. Furthermore, within our support of the SDG process

we want to firmly establish soil protection as a vital part of

the future agenda for sustainable development.

In 2014, the German Federal Ministry for Economic

Cooperation and Development (BMZ) launched the special

initiative ‘One World — No Hunger’, which aims to address

some of the greatest challenges facing humankind. The two

key goals are to overcome hunger and malnutrition among

today‘s population and to create and secure the conditions

for future generations of a growing world population to

feed themselves. The initiative’s multisectoral approach

addresses six fields of action, expanding its activities

in food security, resilience, food security in crises and

conflicts, agricultural innovation, structural change in rural

areas, sustainable use of natural resources and responsible

land use. We have provided additional funds of around

€300 billion in 2014 and 2015 and further funds will prob-

ably be provided in the next two years.

Under the initiative, various global programmes have

been initiated. The Global Programme on Soil Protection

and Soil Rehabilitation for Food Security is among these. It

supports five partner countries with the broad-scale imple-

mentation of field tested approaches for soil conservation

Increasing the productivity of agricultural lands is one key element for achieving food security

Image: Michael Martin

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