Sustainable Land Management

CHALLENGES TO SLM

At the global level, a large area of formerly productive land has been rendered unproductive. Caution is required in interpreting the extent of land degradation and desertification described in the international literature, because local communities often have age-old strategies that allow them to manage land, forest, fallow, and water resources at variable and interacting spatial and temporal levels.  However, there is a general consensus that it is far less expensive to prevent land degradation via the application of good management based on both cultural and scientific knowledge than to rehabilitate degraded land, and that where land is truly degraded, significant production and ecosystem service benefits can result from the rehabilitation of degraded lands.

The potentially deleterious effects of global climate change and natural catastrophes (earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and volcanic activity) on land resources are proving difficult to anticipate, both for the Bank and its clients and for the international community as a whole. In this area, adaptive management tailored to decrease the vulnerability of regions and communities will be increasingly necessary. Other driving forces behind degradation that can be reversed might best be termed “behavioral.” These include misaligned policies and incentives; unclear property rights, especially use rights; and weak enforcement capabilities, often aggravated by corruption and governance problems.

Given the scale of potential benefits and negative effects, it is essential for problem diagnosis, assessments of resource use alternatives, and cost-benefit analyses to be conducted at appropriate spatial and temporal levels. More emphasis needs to be placed on planning and implementation at the watershed and landscape levels. Given the transboundary effects of land, water, and other resource management costs and benefits, equitable regional arrangements and treaties will need to be considered and revised as necessary.

Property rights to resources such as land, water, and trees have been found to play a fundamental role at the nexus of poverty reduction, resource management, and environmental management. The property rights held by poor people represent key household and community assets that may provide income opportunities, ensure access to essential household subsistence needs (water, food, fuel, and medicines), and insure against livelihood risk. Poorer groups tend to rely more heavily on customary or informal rights. It is unlikely that SLM can be achieved in the absence of explicit attention to property rights.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR SLM

Where land and resource management programs have been successful, the following contributing factors have often been present: (a) local community participation in all aspects of the program, (b) public support for private investment in soil and water conservation, (c) improvement and maintenance of roads, (d) sound macroeconomic management that does not discriminate against agriculture and natural resources, (e) robust local capacity building by nongovernmental organizations and other cooperative-type projects, and (f) consistent efforts over at least a decade by concerned governments to increase not only land productivity but also awareness of environmental problems and possible solutions at local levels.

Intensification of Land Use and Integrated Resource Management

Production practices that emphasize integrated nutrient and water management— for example, no-till production, conservation tillage, or mixed cropping that combines food crops with cover crop legumes and/or tree and shrub species—can greatly facilitate SLM. Coupled with enhanced management, improved breeds and varieties of animals, crops, and trees can also significantly increase resource use efficiency in agroecosystems and plantations and reduced pressure on pristine lands, including primary and healthy secondary forests.

The conservation of native above- and below-ground biodiversity is often required for sustaining ecological processes (nutrient cycles, pest-predator associations, and soil structure and function) and to maintain the resilience of most agroecosystems. The stocks of available plant nutrients need to be managed to prevent consumption from exceeding availability and, where necessary, effective recycling of crop residues and manures ought to be supplemented by external (organic and/or fertilizer) sources in order to sustain system function and productivity.

Exploiting the Production and Environmental Functions of Land

In addition to facilitating the production of food, feeds, and industrial crops, natural and agroecosystems also provide a wide variety of “nonmarket” services. The environmental benefits (or services) derived from well-managed agroecosystems typically include but are not limited to (a) improved hydrology: controlling the timing and volume of water flows and protecting water quality; (b) reduced sedimentation: avoiding damage to downstream reservoirs and waterways, thereby safeguarding uses such as hydroelectric power generation, irrigation, recreation, and providing the water necessary for fisheries and domestic water supplies; (c) disaster prevention: preventing floods and landslides; (d) biodiversity conservation; and (e) sequestering carbon and providing sinks for other greenhouse gases.

Payments for environmental services are increasingly important sources of income for land users. For example, the World Bank has pioneered the market for carbon emissions reductions via the $165 million prototype carbon fund to promote compensation for carbon emission reductions in developing countries. Communities in Central America have received payments for carbon sequestration via a program collaboratively financed by the Bank and the Global Environment Facility.

Mechanisms and Incentives for Improved Land Management at the Watershed Level

The following “best practices” have been found to facilitate upstream-downstream land and water management and the equitable assessment of costs and benefits:

• All parties in the watershed are given a stake in the management program and in watershed development functions as an equity-enhancing mechanism.
• Because water is often the most valuable resource of watershed management, it is essential to develop mechanisms that allow an equitable sharing of the water. This resource sharing can substitute for direct payments to some stakeholders.
• Where common property is involved, especially in the upper catchments, it is essential that local communities collectively protect the common land so that land and water resources are not compromised by illegal deforestation or overgrazing and subsequent land degradation.
• If irrigation water is used to produce greater vegetation biomass on common lands, biomass-sharing agreements are needed, especially for landless stakeholders.
• If water harvesting results in improved recharge of groundwater aquifers, designating groundwater as a common property resource can provide all stakeholders with a powerful incentive to improve natural resources management practices and to promote collective action.

TRADE-OFFS AND SLM STRATEGIC OPTIONS

Though the specifics will vary from country to country and region to region, there are four main components to a comprehensive strategy for facilitating sustainable land and natural resource management. These include:

• Policy and sector work
• Research and technology development
• Knowledge sharing and extension
• Providing incentives, expenditure priorities, and modes of financing

Policy and Sector Work

Further empirical work is necessary to clarify the private and social costs and benefits of alternative land use systems. Tradeoffs and synergies need to be identified and quantified where possible. Policy makers need such information when deciding on the relative priorities for the alignment of producer and consumer price incentives, fiscal and financial subsidies, licensing fees and taxation, and the structure of protection in the context of a country’s environmental and social policy objectives.

Research and Technology Development

A revitalization of investments in agricultural and land use research will be needed to underpin the undertaking of SLM strategies and programs at the country and agroecological zone levels. Emphasis must be given to the adaptation and improvement of technologies associated with agricultural intensification, the management and rehabilitation of forest cover in sensitive watersheds, and more effective water management (to avert salinization and mitigate flooding) on irrigated and bottom lands.

A large number of studies have demonstrated that investments in agricultural and natural resource management research can produce significant returns. Despite this evidence, however, current trends are not encouraging. In the wake of the generally successful “Green Revolution” of the 1970s and 1980s, fiscal and financial resource transfers to most national agricultural research systems and institutes have fallen sharply. For example, African countries now spend only 0.5 percent of their agricultural gross domestic product (GDP) on research. A significantly increased adaptive effort is required on issues such as nutrient management and monitoring nutrient balances at appropriate scales, development of stress-tolerant varieties, and the rehabilitation of degraded lands.

Investing in research on how to better adapt current land management systems to cope with increasing climate variability and climate change and the associated shocks and stresses, such as drought, flood, pests, and soil salinity, will also result in improved adaptation to climate change.

Geographic information systems (GIS), geo-spatial mapping, and remote sensing technologies are central to achieving a successful transition from traditional environmental and resource management practices to sustainable development because of their integrative quality (linking social, economic, and environmental data) and their place-based quality (addressing relationships among places at local, national, regional, and global levels).

For instance, there is growing recognition by decision makers that problems at the intersection of agriculture and environmental management, climate change, and land vegetative cover change, with their attendant social and economic consequences, will be at the forefront in the new century. Technological advances in GIS fostering the integration of satellite imagery with other data (such as socioeconomic or health data) are opening new ways to synthesize complex and diverse geographic data sets, creating new opportunities for collaboration among natural and social scientists and decision makers at all levels.

Knowledge Sharing and Extension

For improved land management practices, it will be important to build farmer innovation into national extension programs and into agricultural and natural resource management initiatives. Experience shows that farmers do not passively wait for extension advice, but actively experiment and innovate with agricultural and natural resource management practices. A major advantage of innovations by farmers is that they are site-specific and often are readily acceptable to neighboring farmers. The incorporation of the farmer innovation approach within a systematic venue can significantly improve the performance of agroextension and technoadvisory services, particularly in the field of soil and water conservation, where the visual impact of demonstrations can be a powerful way to attract potential end users of new “best practices.”

Although land users can financially contribute to costs, public funding will be required in the poorer areas to prepare and facilitate such visits and provide follow-up. The establishment of research partnerships will be central to helping farmers conserve their land and water resources and meet other environmental and social objectives. Advising and assisting agriculturalists in this area might be commercially unattractive for private companies, but it should be an appropriate initial role for the public sector with the aim of establishing effective public-private sector partnerships.

When designing extension programs (privately operated or public sector) and the feedback systems that can capture farmer innovations, consideration should be given to establishing regional centers where information on best practices or success stories can be accessed by farmers’ organizations and other entities. Such an approach is especially important in the larger countries and in those with an agroecologically diverse natural resource endowment, where a “one-size-fits-all” approach does not work and innovative technologies need to be adapted to local conditions.

Providing Incentives, Expenditure Priorities, and Modes of Financing

SLM practices are likely to be adopted where agriculture is important in rural livelihoods, where agricultural land is in short supply, and/or where SLM has the potential to increase yields of high-value crops.

Policies to facilitate SLM are more likely to be successful if they provide tangible benefits to the individual household or community by emphasizing enhanced agricultural productivity, food security, and income, rather than by controlling land degradation per se. In this context, a policy framework which provides for market access and attractive producer prices is essential to SLM.

In addition to offering policy incentives, normally operating at price and cost margins sufficient to redirect the private sector’s utilization of resources in directions deemed socially desirable, achieving SLM will require additional investments in research and technology generation, knowledge dissemination, and the integration of knowledge and policies at appropriate spatial and temporal levels.

The costs of these investments can be considerable in countries where severe degradation has already taken place—often over decades and even centuries— and in those countries that will be hard hit by increasing climate variability and eventual climate change. Thus governments will need to (a) realistically assess the availability of resources, domestic and foreign, then (b) prioritize investments to rehabilitate the most egregiously damaged lands and soils (as measured, primarily, by the opportunity costs of taking no action), (c) develop a realistic phasing of investments, (d) set forth financing plans, and (e) seek agreements with likely beneficiaries in the private sector and civil society, both to participate in program implementation and to share a portion of the costs in accord with agreed mechanisms. To stimulate the involvement of private investors in land-friendly commercial activities would relieve pressures on the budget for adequate program finance while bringing to bear some of the flexibility and responsiveness needed to address the physical and financial contingencies associated with the kinds of investments mentioned. The use of risk reduction or guarantee funds or the provision of insurance, partially underwritten by government, might prove sufficient in some countries to induce a strong private sector response.

For more information on SLM please download:

Sustainable Land Management: Challenges, Opportunities, and Trade-offs. World Bank 2006

Goal of the Report:

The overall goal of the report is to give a strategic focus to the implementation of the sustainable land management (SLM) components of the World Bank’s corporate strategies. The specific objectives of the report are to articulate priorities for investment in SLM and natural resource management and to identify the policy, institutional and incentive reform options that will accelerate the adoption of SLM productivity improvements and pro-poor growth.  The primary audiences for the report are policy makers and project managers in partner countries and development organizations, as well as Bank country and sector managers and task team leaders.