Abstract
Land-use planning (LUP), an instrument of land governance, is often employed to protect land and humans against natural and human-induced hazards, strengthen the resilience of land systems, and secure their sustainability. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) underlines the critical role of appropriate local action to address the global threat of land degradation and desertification (LDD) and calls for the use of local and regional LUP to combat LDD and achieve land degradation neutrality. The paper explores the challenges of putting this call into practice. After presenting desertification and the pertinent institutional context, the paper examines whether and how LDD concerns enter the stages of the LUP process and the issues arising at each stage. LDD problem complexity, the prevailing mode of governance, and the planning style endorsed, combined with LDD awareness, knowledge and perception, value priorities, geographic particularities and historical circumstances, underlie the main challenges confronting LUP; namely, adequate representation of LDD at each stage of LUP, conflict resolution between LDD-related and development goals, need for cooperation, collaboration and coordination of numerous and diverse actors, sectors, institutions and policy domains from multiple spatial/organizational levels and uncertainty regarding present and future environmental and socio-economic change. In order to realize the integrative potential of LUP and foster its effectiveness in combating LDD at the local and regional levels, the provision of an enabling, higher-level institutional environment should be prioritized to support phrοnetic-strategic integrated LUP at lower levels, which future research should explore theoretically, methodologically and empirically.
Highlights
Land1 mediates all interactions between the natural environment, society and the economy [2,3].Land resources provide ecosystem services and pose constraints on human activity which, if violated, generate important unwanted environmental and socio-economic consequences
Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15, one of the 17 SDGs decided at the Rio+20 conference in 2012, is geared to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss” [8]
In order to assess the prospects of land-use planning successfully meeting the overarching goal of combating land degradation and desertification (LDD) and mitigating the impacts of drought at the local and the regional level, this section undertakes a reality check of the ideal Land-use planning (LUP) process; it inquires whether and how LDD
Summary
Land mediates all interactions between the natural environment, society and the economy [2,3]. In LDD-prone areas, in particular, the LDN goal makes LUP an inevitable instrument in the fight against LDD This is a demanding undertaking because LUP is called to harmonize the LDN with numerous other goals and it is, complicated by the ever-present uncertainty regarding future human needs, goals and priorities, environmental conditions, socio-economic and technological “Land systems constitute complex, adaptive social-ecological systems (Berkes et al, 1998) shaped by interactions between (i) the different actors and demands that act upon land, (ii) the technologies, institutions, and cultural practices through which societies shape land use, and (iii) feedbacks between land use and environmental dynamics The concluding section suggests necessary priority actions to realize the integrative potential of LUP and, improve its effectiveness in combating LDD that indicate future research directions
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