ABSTRACT
Despite humanity’s fundamental dependence on them, land and soil for productive use has been lost or its capacity to provide essential ecosystem services severely degraded on vast areas of the Earth. Especially given population growth with burgeoning demands, this is a tremendous problem across the globe with diverse scales, contexts, causes, and consequences. This chapter outlines the rationale for and approaches to reversing degradation and its multiple consequences. Global scale agreements must be connected with and complemented by national, regional, and local implementation and governance processes to address the localized conditions and contexts that influence land degradation, use, and restoration.
