Desire for Greener Land

It is notable that all cropping management technologies
are sensitive to droughts and dry spells. However, this can
be explained because of their sole dependence on annual
crops. In dryland areas, crops usually receive close to the
minimum amount of water that they need to give yield;
hence any decrease of water availability might induce crop
failure. Temporal variability, such as periods of drought, also
affects crop growth. Besides, these systems do not provide
an alternative source of income, such as with agroforestry
systems or other technologies. On the other hand, the sensitivity
to droughts might be reduced due to the applied SLM
technology, as water is better stored in the soil with the help
of improved infiltration and better soil cover. This could lead
to an increase in the amount of water made available to the
plant, especially during dry periods.
Water management technologies are also sensitive to
droughts, but even more so to floods, which is indicated as
a problem by six out of the eight water management technologies.
It is a special challenge to have water harvesting
structures which are strong enough to withstand the power
of floods.
Apart from droughts, coping with heavy storms and a
decrease of seasonal rainfall are two additional concerns
for dryland regions. It must be highlighted that except for
five technologies (17%) all of the others are tolerant to such
extreme events. Some of them, especially the cross slope
barriers, have been designed to cope with extreme storm
events. With regards to the seasonal decrease of rainfall,
approximately one third is sensitive (11 out of 30), which is
spread over all groups, except the forest management. The
two grazing land management examples are both sensitive
to seasonal rainfall decrease, which diminishes the availability
of fodder. Again this illustrates that good practices
today are already designed to cope with climatic extremes
and possible shifts.
In general, most of the technologies are tolerant to the
expected climatic variations. In a few areas there might
even be an opportunity for increased rainwater availability.
However, especially for the Mediterranean region, in which
most of the selected case studies are located, most of the
climate prediction scenarios forecast declining rainfalls 5 .
Human environment
To identify the type of land users applying the SLM technology,
the WOCAT questionnaire assesses if the land user
is working (i) individually and at household level or (ii) in
Spain, Erik van den Elsen
Morocco, Erik van den Elsen
Cropping
management
groups / communities, (iii) in cooperatives or (iv) as employee
of a company or the government. Almost all DESIRE SLM
technologies are applied at the individual or household
level, except those of the forest management group.
Another issue used to characterise the land users is their size
of scale, i.e. from small scale land users to large scale land
users. Here, the picture of the DESIRE case studies is more
diversified, although the majority (57%) is small-scale land
users (see Figure 11). This helps to support the theory that
within the smallholder farming sector there is significant
and underestimated worldwide investment and innovation
in conservation 6 .
Land ownership and land use rights are important issues
that can hinder or facilitate the uptake of SLM technologies.
The majority of results from previous studies demonstrate
that individual ownership of the land facilitates the implementation
of SLM 7 . Figure 12 confirms this picture. Land use
rights might be even more important than land ownership
because security of tenure can provide the same degree of
confidence to carry out SLM as titled ownership. For the
DESIRE case studies, the data on land use rights shows an
almost identical pattern as the data on land ownership.
Cropping land management technologies are all individually
owned and titled. Thus, SLM successes on cropland are all
on private land. This statement also counts for cross-slope
4 WOCAT, 2007
5 EEA, 2008
6 WOCAT, 2007; Wegner and Zwart, 2011
7 WOCAT, 2007
Analysis of assessed SLM technologies and approaches across DESIRE sites DESIRE – WOCAT 2012
No. of case studies
Land users applying the SLM technology
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
Water
management
Cross-slope
barriers
Grazing land
management
SLM technology groups
Forest
management
n.a.
large scale land user
medium scale land user
small scale land user
DESIRE - WOCAT 2012
Figure 11: Land users applying the SLM technology in relation
to the SLM technologies groups.
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