Sustainable Forestry

Ecological Restoration for Achieving the Goals of Land Degradation Neutrality

Submission deadline: 2023-05-31
Special Issue Editors

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues

In an era of global environmental change, human society is experiencing large scale landscape degradation, a climate crisis, biodiversity loss, and chemical pollution. Land degradation due to deforestation and poor agricultural practices leading to heavy soil erosion, salinization, land fragmentation, intensive cultivation, labour problem and over-exploitation of natural resources has become a critical issue worldwide, especially in the developing countries, which face great concerns about food security. Beside these lands, a sizable area lies barren in dry ecologies due to lack of good-quality water for irrigation as the underground aquifers in these areas are saline. Bio-amelioration is a viable option to restore the degraded landscapes and by judicious use of saline water for greening the degraded calcareous drylands and urban landscapes. 

Thus, restoring degraded land, preparing for climate resilient agriculture, providing livelihood security to rural and urban poor, and addressing pandemic threats like Covid-19 are some of the greatest challenges of modern time. Restoring our land intrinsically gives us a chance to a healthier future by implementing land degradation neutrality. The recently published Land Outlook Report-2 sets a goal of restoring 1 billion hectares of degraded land globally by 2030 to achieve the goal of land degradation neutrality through ecosystem restoration. Successful technologies and results obtained from these studies may establish the fact that by integrating stress-tolerant trees including fruit trees, forage grasses, arable crops and under-explored crops (including high-value aromatic and medicinal crops) using appropriate technologies a significant agricultural production can be obtained from the degraded land and water resources and the agroforestry systems may support reclamation of these soils and sustain the livelihood security of resource-poor farmers dependent on these marginal lands. This issue aims to synthesize the results of long-term studies on the ecological restoration of highly degraded lands by using appropriate technologies and agroforestry practices, hence the articles are being invited for this special issue of Sustainable Forestry.

Dr. Jagdish Chander Dagar

Dr Sharda Rani Gupta

Guest Editors


Planned Papers

Keywords

Degraded landscapes; Land degradation neutrality; Poor-quality waters; Technological interventions; Agroforestry practices; Ecological restoration; Sustainable development goals; Urban forestry; Quality of life; Covid-19 pandemic; Livelihood security

Published Paper