Sustainable Land Management for Mitigating Climate Change

(iii) Identify SLM Options: Site specific SLM options must be identified to address these priority issues. Examples of SLM options may include: conservation agriculture, drought-tolerant crop varieties, efficient irrigation methods, water harvesting and recycling, INM, agroforestry, etc. Similar to prioritization of issues, identification of SLM options must also be done with full participation of the target communities.

(iv) Establish On-Farm Demonstrations/Research: There is evidence from various parts of the world that farmers not only have a very good knowledge of the land degradation/soil dynamics in their localities, but they are in fact taking measures to innovate and conserve their lands (Pagiola and Dixon, 1997; Reij and Waters-Bayer, 2001). Hence validation of SLM vis-à-vis traditional methods of soil and water management must be done under on-farm conditions using a farmer participatory approach. Most farmers in regions of global hot spots (see above) are small land holders (1-2 ha). Thus, on-farm demonstrations may involve 50 to 100 farms. It is important that SLM research questions are formulated to be practically relevant to producers/farmers and policy makers by identifying which problems are important under what conditions and in what locations (e.g., what is needed on a steep slope is not the same as what is needed on a shallower one in the same general location). Hence research should avoid generic questions such as estimating returns to soil conservation in a given area or assessing the cost of land degradation to a country. While such studies may be difficult and interesting, they have limited operational relevance since (a) results tend to be incredibly site-specific meaning wide differences in what farmers can realistically do depending on their access to land, credit, markets, labor and knowledge (Scoones and Toulmin, 1999), (b) farmers/producers in study areas are usually already aware of the key issues, (c) data needs make it is easy to get the concept and assumptions wrong, and (d) apart from showing how big the problem is, such studies tend to have limited value in addressing the problem. Therefore, research questions should attempt to understand how land degradation relates to poverty in any given area, and how SLM can contribute to improving farmers’/producers’ livelihoods while reducing land degrataion and contributing to local climate action.