Re-generating wastelands by organizing communities to address degradation through sustainable land management programmes leads to food security and poverty alleviation.

Vast expanses of lands have lost their vegetal cover and their fertility has drastically dropped leading to poor yields and meager harvests irrespective of the size of the area cultivated.

This is the result of land degradation caused mainly by climate change and its attendant impacts which are desertification, wastelands, deforestation, aggravated by overgrazing, excess use of fertilizers and pesticides, soil erosion, etc., the direct consequences of which are drought, famine, migration, and conflicts.  

Greenfacts has it that worldwide, approximately half of the people living below the poverty line live in dry lands and their societies are particularly vulnerable as a result of dry land ecosystem conditions and poverty. Addressing desertification would therefore contribute to the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.

CCRF mobilizes the community of land owners and land users for the dissemination of knowledge on land management in the context of climate change resilience and adaptation.

Under the guidance of scientists they are taught to adopt integrated soil, nutrient, and water conservation approaches that combine technologies based on biological, chemical, and physical principles. This could significantly reduce the negative externalities of intensive crop and livestock systems and improve the productivity of lower-yielding but environmentally friendly production systems in more marginal farming areas.

Uphoff in his article advanced a workable strategy adopted by CCRF “because preventing land degradation is usually far less expensive and more effective than rehabilitating badly degraded lands, the first priority is to prevent the degradation of currently productive land.

The second priority is to rehabilitate moderately degraded lands and then the severely degraded lands via measures that facilitate the recovery of soil biological communities essential to efficient nutrient conservation and soil physical integrity” (Uphoff et al. 2006),