Editing IPCC:AR6/SRCCL/Chapter-4 (section)

== 4.10 Knowledge gaps and key uncertainties ==

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The co-benefits of improved land management, such as mitigation of climate change, increased climate resilience of agriculture, and impacts on rural areas/societies are well known in theory, but there is a lack of a coherent and systematic global inventory of such integrated efforts. Both successes and failures are important to document systematically.

Efforts to reduce climate change through land-demanding mitigation actions aimed at removing atmospheric carbon, such as afforestation, reforestation, bioenergy crops, intensification of land management and plantation forestry can adversely affect land conditions and lead to degradation. However, they may also lead to avoidance, reduction and reversal of degradation. Regionally differentiated, socially and ecologically appropriate SLM strategies need to be identified, implemented, monitored and the results communicated widely to ensure climate effective outcomes.

Impacts of new technologies on land degradation and their social and economic ramifications need more research.

Improved quantification of the global extent, severity and rates of land degradation by combining remote sensing with a systematic use of ancillary data is a priority. The current attempts need better scientific underpinning and appropriate funding.

Land degradation is defined using multiple criteria but the definition does not provide thresholds or the magnitude of acceptable change. In practice, human interactions with land will result in a variety of changes; some may contribute positively to one criterion while adversely affecting another. Research is required on the magnitude of impacts and the resulting trade-offs. Given the urgent need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and to reduce climate change impacts, it is important to reach agreement on what level of reduction in one criterion (biological productivity, ecological integrity) may be acceptable for a given increase in another criterion (ecological integrity, biological productivity).

Attribution of land degradation to the underlying drivers is a challenge because it is a complex web of causality rather than a simple cause–effect relationship. Also, diverging views on land degradation in relation to other challenges is hampering such efforts.

A more systematic treatment of the views and experiences of land users would be useful in land degradation studies.

Much research has tried to understand how social and ecological systems are affected by a particular stressor, for example, drought, heat, or waterlogging. But less research has tried to understand how such systems are affected by several simultaneous stressors – which is more realistic in the context of climate change (Mittler 2006 <sup>[[#fn:r1|1]]</sup> ).

More realistic modelling of carbon dynamics, including better appreciation of below-ground biota, would help us to better quantify the role of soils and soil management for soil carbon sequestration.

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