Land Degradation And Socio Economic Development

This book offers an overview of recent literature on land degradation and its interrelationship with socio-economic development processes in the developing world. It provides an in-depth analysis of land degradation as a physical process, with an emphasis on the local and regional scales. The volume contains a detailed case-study of ravine formation processes in the Chambal valley, a unique but least studied part of the world. Using multi-scale and multi-disciplinary approaches, and combining spatial socio-economic data with remote sensing data, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the causes and implications of land degradation.

This book offers an overview of recent literature on land degradation and its interrelationship with socio-economic development processes in the developing world. It provides an in-depth analysis of land degradation as a physical process, with an emphasis on the local and regional scales. The volume contains a detailed case-study of ravine formation processes in the Chambal valley, a unique but least studied part of the world. Using multi-scale and multi-disciplinary approaches, and combining spatial socio-economic data with remote sensing data, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the causes and implications of land degradation.

Contents: Dirt poor: poverty, farmers and soil resource investment/ by Leslie Lipper; Methodological issues in analysing the linkages between socio-eocnomic and environmental systems/ by Dan Osgood and Leslie Lipper. Includes 1-page abstracts in French, Spanish and Arabic

This volume deals with land degradation, which is occurring in almost all terrestrial biomes and agro-ecologies, in both low and high income countries and is stretching to about 30% of the total global land area. About three billion people reside in these degraded lands. However, the impact of land degradation is especially severe on livelihoods of the poor who heavily depend on natural resources. The annual global cost of land degradation due to land use and cover change (LUCC) and lower cropland and rangeland productivity is estimated to be about 300 billion USD. Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounts for the largest share (22%) of the total global cost of land degradation. Only about 38% of the cost of land degradation due to LUCC - which accounts for 78% of the US$300 billion loss – is borne by land users and the remaining share (62%) is borne by consumers of ecosystem services off the farm. The results in this volume indicate that reversing land degradation trends makes both economic sense, and has multiple social and environmental benefits. On average, one US dollar investment into restoration of degraded land returns five US dollars. The findings of the country case studies call for increased investments into the rehabilitation and restoration of degraded lands, including through such institutional and policy measures as strengthening community participation for sustainable land management, enhancing government effectiveness and rule of law, improving access to markets and rural services, and securing land tenure. The assessment in this volume has been conducted at a time when there is an elevated interest in private land investments and when global efforts to achieve sustainable development objectives have intensified. In this regard, the results of this volume can contribute significantly to the ongoing policy debate and efforts to design strategies for achieving sustainable development goals and related efforts to address land degradation and halt biodiversity loss.

Why does land management so often fail to prevent soil erosion, deforestation, salination and flooding? How serious are these problems, and for whom? This book, first published in 1987, sets out to answer these questions, which are still some of the most crucial issues in development today, using an approach called ‘regional political ecology’. This approach acknowledges that the reason why land management can fail are extremely varied, and must include a thorough understanding of the changing natural resource base itself, the human response to this, and broader changes in society, of which land managers are a part. Land Degradation and Society is essential reading for all students of geography, agriculture, social sciences, development studies and related subjects.

This book takes a new approach on understanding causes of extreme poverty and promising actions to address it. Its focus is on marginality being a root cause of poverty and deprivation. “Marginality” is the position of people on the edge, preventing their access to resources, freedom of choices, and the development of capabilities. The book is research based with original empirical analyses at local, national, and local scales; book contributors are leaders in their fields and have backgrounds in different disciplines. An important message of the book is that economic and ecological approaches and institutional innovations need to be integrated to overcome marginality. The book will be a valuable source for development scholars and students, actors that design public policies, and for social innovators in the private sector and non-governmental organizations.​

World Bank Technical Paper No. 280. Addresses the need to improve the administration of justice in Latin America and the Caribbean and provides effective strategies for reform. Judicial reform is a new area of interest for the World Bank. This book addresses the need to improve the administration of justice in Latin America and the Caribbean and provides effective strategies for reform. The report combines the experiences of more than 20 countries in their effort to enhance the quality and efficiency of their judicial systems. The authors highlight the importance of the judiciary in economic development, with a particular focus on court administration, the judicial institutional framework, alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, procedural reforms, access to justice, and the role of the legal profession.

Healthy soils are essential for sustaining economies and human livelihoods. In spite of this, the key ecosystem services provided by soils have usually been taken for granted and their true value - beyond market value - is being underrated. This pattern of undervaluation of soils is about to change in view of rapidly raising land prices, which is the result of increased shortage of land and raising output prices that drive implicit prices of land (with access to water) upward. Moreover, the value of soil related ecosystems services is being better understood and increasingly valued.It is estimated that about a quarter of global land area is degraded, affecting about 1.5 billion people in all agro-ecologies around the world. Land degradation has its highest toll on the livelihoods and well-being of the poorest households in the rural areas of developing countries. Vicious circles of poverty and land degradation, as well as transmission effects from rural poverty and food insecurity to national economies, critically hamper their development process.Despite the need for preventing and reversing land degradation, the problem has yet to be appropriately addressed. Policy action for sustainable land use is lacking, and a policy framework for action is missing. Key objectives of this Issue Paper and of a proposed related global assessment of the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) are: first, to raise awareness about the need for and role of an assessment of the economic, social and environmental costs of land degradation; and second, to propose and illustrate a scientific framework to conduct such an assessment, based on the costs of action versus inaction against land degradation. Preliminary findings suggest that the costs of inaction are much higher than the costs of action.