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How to halt the global decline of lands

Nature Sustainability volume 3, pages 164–166 (2020)Cite this article

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The assessment of land degradation and restoration by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services shows that land degradation across the globe is a wide and severe issue and is showing no signs of slowing down. This trend must be halted and reversed.

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Fig. 1

illustration by Yuka Otsuki Estrada.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the hundreds of people who volunteered their expertise in producing and reviewing the IPBES Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment. A full list of their names is presented in the Supplementary Information.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands

    Louise Willemen

  2. Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Nichole N. Barger

  3. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, The Hague, the Netherlands

    Ben ten Brink

  4. School of BioSciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Matthew Cantele

  5. Faculty of Natural & Agricultural Sciences, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Barend F. N. Erasmus

  6. Institute of Agriculture, University of Western Australia, Perth, Western Australia, Australia

    Judith L. Fisher

  7. Stockholm Environment Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

    Toby Gardner

  8. University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Timothy G. Holland

  9. University of Tours, Tours, France

    Florent Kohler

  10. School or Resource Wisdom / Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Janne S. Kotiaho

  11. Smart Places, CSIR, Pretoria, South Africa

    Graham P. von Maltitz

  12. Wildlife Conservation Society, Kampala, Uganda

    Grace Nangendo

  13. UWA School of Agriculture and Environment, University of Western Australia, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia

    Ram Pandit

  14. Research and Development, USDA Forest Service, Washington, DC, USA

    John A. Parrotta

  15. Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

    Matthew D. Potts

  16. Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Stephen D. Prince

  17. Ecology & Evolution, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, Karnataka, India

    Mahesh Sankaran

  18. GRP Secretariat, Global Resilience Partnership, Stockholm, Sweden

    Anastasia Brainich

  19. Joint Research Centre, European Commission, Ispra, Italy

    Luca Montanarella

  20. Global Change Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Robert Scholes

Authors
  1. Louise Willemen
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  2. Nichole N. Barger
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  4. Matthew Cantele
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  5. Barend F. N. Erasmus
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  12. Grace Nangendo
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  15. Matthew D. Potts
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  16. Stephen D. Prince
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  17. Mahesh Sankaran
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  18. Anastasia Brainich
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  19. Luca Montanarella
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  20. Robert Scholes
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Louise Willemen.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Willemen, L., Barger, N.N., Brink, B.t. et al. How to halt the global decline of lands. Nat Sustain 3, 164–166 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0477-x

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