Towards Sustainable Land Use

A number of contributions to this publication contain a wide variety of successful, practical and often innovative solutions for sustainable land use. Examples include improvements to soil quality in sites where the soil has already been degraded as well as precautions for soil protection. They should strengthen the international community in its commitment to further support programmes to improve land quality. National and sub-national governments should support financial and economic baseline studies on the implications of continued degradation, and use the results to design appropriate policy responses in, for example, support to extension, research marketing facilities and related programmes in healthcare, education, etc. Transboundary eco-regional land conservation and basin-wide watershed development can be facilitated under the auspices of international conventions, action programmes or regional frameworks. "Prevention" should be the leading principle in soil conservation policy, since "rehabilitation" is extremely difficult and often not possible at all, once symptoms of soil degradation are detected. From a global point of view, the balance of the successes achieved in combating soil degradation in comparison to the deteriorations in soil quality occurring at other sites has been negative for quite some time. Therefore, on the one hand, efforts to implement sustainable forms of land management appropriate to a particular site and for the development and trials of new and innovative approaches must continue to be intensified. On the other hand, the dissemination of knowledge about responsible land management to land users and to broad sections of the population must be further improved.