Sharing the Land: Restoring Degraded Ecosystems and Improving Livelihoods Through Agroforestry

Magazine article, 2014

The challenge is daunting: how to feed more than 7 billion people – nearly 10 billion by 20501 – even as key resources become scarcer. Roughly 24% of the world’s land area is degrading,including more than a fifth of the cropland and nearly a third of the forests – yet 1.5 billion people directly depend on degraded areas. Some countries are particularly hard-hit:95% of Swaziland’s land is degraded, as is 66% of Angola’s, 64% of Gabon’s, 60% of Thailand’s, and 60% of Zambia’s. In China, 457 million people are affected by land degradation.