The project will promote landscape-level integrated ecosystem management of native Caatinga vegetation by implementing a combination of best practices that, on the one hand, ensure sustainable environments for crop and livestock production while, on the other hand, reducing land degradation, enabling biodiversity conservation and maintenance of ecosystem functions, reducing threats to natural resources and promoting reclamation of degraded land. The actions of extension, training and strengthening of multi-sectoral approaches will promote replication in all of Brazil's areas susceptible to desertification, creating opportunities for expansion of sustainable landscapes. These efforts increase the environmental sustainability of economic development and poverty reduction programs and generate multiple global environmental benefits. Significant benefits in terms of combating desertification will be achieved, since the project presents a strategy based on best practices as alternatives to major drivers of desertification including deforestation, overgrazing and soil salinization. The project will result in reduced carbon emissions and increased carbon sequestration through the reduction of deforestation. It will also promote integrated management of natural resources that allows for grazing and collection of biomass following sustainability criteria, ensuring conservation of biodiversity and maintaining sustainable landscapes.
Best practices implemented in the field sites in areas susceptible to desertification will be multiplied through a multi-sectoral extension approach. This will contribute to water and soil conservation, reduced soil degradation and salinization and establishment of sustainable production environments in semiarid areas. These in turn promote food, water and energy security as well as biodiversity conservation. They contribute to improved quality of life and reduction of poverty by promoting sustainable coexistence with semiaridity, while effectively combating land degradation and desertification.
The project will demonstrate that it is possible to promote development and poverty alleviation in areas susceptible to desertification together with conservation of biodiversity, capture of carbon from the atmosphere, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, prevention of soil degradation, reclamation, i.e. integrated natural resource management. The best training institutions for the integrated management of natural resources and the dissemination of good practices in the demonstration areas will provide other long-term global benefits, in particular the management of watersheds and landscapes related to hydrological cycles, which are vital in areas susceptible to desertification.
Additional global benefits such as reducing carbon emissions will be generated to promote a change in land use and vegetation, good management practices of natural resources for preparing soil for crops, sustainable forestry techniques and other sustainable practices that maintain forest cover in the Caatinga, the conservation of soil and water, presented as alternatives to the degradation process that generate, promote net benefits of climate change, biodiversity conservation and combating desertification. The overall benefits are also enhanced by the increase in carbon capture in degraded lands that are restored through afforestation and the implementation of appropriate land use practices.
Table 12 provides a specific breakdown of the global environmental benefits of each good practice that will be promoted by the project.
