Sustainable Land Restoration and Management

13% of the world’s land area, the equivalent of South America, is degraded due to increasing human and climatic pressures, and could be restored! Forest and Landscape Restoration (FLR) and Sustainable Land Management (SLM) have huge environmental and social impacts, and need to be scaled up.

The issues

Southern countries are severely affected by land degradation. This is particularly the case in the Sahel countries, which are confronted with strong natural constraints (often violent rainfall giving rise to high runoff; high temperatures; strong aridity; soils that are often sandy, shallow, deficient in phosphorus and nitrogen, and with a low level of organic matter), which are exacerbated by climate change and anthropic pressures (demographic boom, increase in the need for agricultural land, grazing land, and firewood, etc.). All this in a context often marked by weak governance, poor decentralisation and land tenure insecurity. However, the populations of the South, particularly in the Sahel, depend heavily on natural resources to meet their food needs (agriculture, livestock, fishing, non-timber forest products – NTFPs), their cooking energy needs (wood and charcoal), their needs for traditional pharmacopoeia products, etc. Restoring these degraded lands and then managing them sustainably therefore has an important impact on poverty reduction, improving food security, restoring ecosystem services and adapting to the effects of climate change.

Our services

We are fully engaged in international FLR and SLM initiatives such as Land Degradation Neutrality, Bonn Challenge, African Land Restoration Initiative (AFRI100), Great Green Wall, etc. We contribute our expertise and skills in various SLM-related fields (climate change, sustainable agriculture, forest management, bioenergy, reforestation, mapping and remote sensing, etc.), in order to have a holistic and multidisciplinary approach to address the social, economic and environmental challenges of SLM in a pragmatic and reasoned manner. We contribute to the formulation and evaluation of projects, to the realization of specific studies, to the training and capacity building of government officials, local authorities, civil society and the private sector to promote proven SLM approaches and good practices.