The Role of Sustainable Land Management for Climate ... - CAADP

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3. The role of Sustainable Land Management in Sub-Saharan Africa
Key messages
• Land degradation is widespread in Africa, especially in drylands and forest margin
areas.
• Land degradation in SSA is caused mainly by conversion of forests, woodlands and
rangelands to crop production; overgrazing of rangelands; and unsustainable
agricultural practices on croplands.
• Climate variability and change can contribute to land degradation by making current
land use practices unsustainable and inducing more rapid conversion of land to
unsustainable uses. However, climate change also can offer new opportunities for
sustainable land management, by increasing temperature and rainfall in some
environments, through CO 2 fertilization effects, or through the development of markets
for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
• Land degradation increases the vulnerability of rural people in SSA to climate variability
and change, while SLM can reduce it.
• SLM also provides major opportunities to mitigate climate change by sequestering
carbon or reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
3.1 Land Degradation in sub-Saharan Africa
It is widely accepted that management of African lands is much less productive and sustainable
than what is possible or desirable. The strong evidence for this comes from data on land
degradation and its effects.
The first attempt to quantify the extent and severity of land degradation in Africa was
from a “convergence of evidence” and expert consensus through the Global Assessment of Soil
Degradation (GLASOD) project (Oldeman, 1994). That effort generated data which revealed
that by 1990 some 20 percent of the region was affected by slight to extreme land degradation.
The data indicate that the land degradation in different classes is light (one percent), moderate
(four percent), severe (five percent) and very severe (seven percent) such that seven percent of
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