Land degradation and the GEF: A Guide to developing project proposals and accessing project funding from the global environment facility for sustainable land management

Throughout the world, land degradation is internationally recognised as a threat to the global environmental commons. It is associated with desertification, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, climate change, sedimentation, and pollution of international waters. At the Second GEF Assembly in 2002, participants agreed to designate land degradation, primarily desertification and deforestation, as a new focal area of the GEF. This designation made sustainable land management a primary focus of the GEF, which is seeking to optimize GEF's work on land degradation in arid, semi-arid, sub-humid and humid areas in a more consistent, systematic, and integrated way. In May 2003, the GEF Council approved the operational program on sustainable land management, a framework for GEF assistance to strengthen public policy and enabling environments for addressing land degradation, especially desertification and deforestation. The framework promotes a cross-sectoral and integrated approach to natural resources management within the GEF. These guidelines will assist stakeholders in accessing GEF resources for sustainable land management. Following the various steps of the GEF project cycle and combined with technical information on GEF’s approach to sustainable land management, the reader receives simple, but complete, guidance on how to successfully present a project proposal for GEF incremental financing under the GEF Focal Area Land Degradation (Desertification and Deforestation).