World leaders will launch a new alliance to boost drought resilience on Monday, 7 November 2022, at the Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Change Conference in Egypt. The high-level launch event, jointly convened by Senegal and Spain, titled, International Drought Resilience Alliance, will take place from 17:00-18:00hrs local time.

World leaders recognize the urgent need to shift drought management approaches from the current emergency response to resilience. The Alliance is envisioned as a collaborative platform to rally political momentum and trigger actions that support countries, cities, and communities to enable this shift and significantly reduce their vulnerability, impact and exposure to extreme drought.

Are you a land use planner or practitioner versed in science and technology? 

Apply to November "Scenarios for Integrated Land Use Planning (S4ILUP)" workshop series, focused on horizontal integration between the different areas of ILUP as well as vertical integration to address common challenges and needs in evidence-based decision-making on land.

S4ILUP has formed by partners from UNCCD, FAO, the ELD Initiative, the GEO-LDN Initiative and WOCAT to identify challenges and best practices, facilitate the dialogue between data users and providers, support the development and accessibility of better tools for ILUP.

During the 2022 International civil society Summit «Desertif'actions» taking place from 5 to 8 October in Montpellier, WOCAT and UNCCD will hold a joint session on tools, knowledge, partnership and services to bring Sustainable Land Management and Agroecology to scale by context. The session will start at 18.00 local time and Dr. Rima Mekdaschi Studer, SLM expert of the Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) at University of Bern, will present "WOCAT: Good Practices and an Open Network - Bringing SLM/Agroecology to Scale" and moderate the panel discussion.

WOCAT and FAO set up a survey to gather information from different actors working in the field of SLM and land restoration about their expertise and interest in South-South knowledge exchange. In particular, partners form Central Asia, Near East, North Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are kindly invited to fill out the survey. 

On the 22th of November, WOCAT SLM Expert Ingrid Teich gave a capacity building session on the use of Google Earth Engine to map land degradation in Panama. It was co-organized it with the Ministry of Environment Panama and was the first of a series of activities under the GEF-funded Enabling Activities to strengthen national capacities towards enhanced UNCCD monitoring and reporting. 

From 18 to 20 October, a WOCAT training for the documentation of SLM practices was held in Tabarka, Tunisia with participants from research, extension and government institutions. Previous to the training,  the goals of the training were presented to the DG ACTA which is coordinating the ProSoil project in Tunisia. Training participants learned how to document SLM practices in a standardized format as well as about the importance of SLM knowledge products for different stakeholders, the inclusion of SLM best practices in the UNCCD PRAIS4 report and the SLM documentation and knowledge products planned for Tunisia.

From 23 to 25 of August, a WOCAT training on SLM Technologies and Approaches documentation and related global WOCAT Database was held in Antananarivo, Madagascar, for stakeholders from government, NGOs and research organizations. The training is part of a series of trainings in the seven GIZ ProSoil countries, under the lead of WOCAT Consortium Partner CIAT-Biodiversity.