The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has launched updated Guidelines for Integrated Land Use Planning (ILUP), the first major revision since 1993, to help countries decide how to use, restore and protect land, soil and water as demand for them grows. The guidelines were presented on 29 October at the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP17) in Yerevan.
The framework is voluntary and non-binding. It is meant to help governments balance the claims of agriculture, urban growth and infrastructure against conservation, restoration, food and water security, land degradation neutrality, climate resilience and economic development, and to make those choices on evidence and with the people affected taking part.
FAO says the guidelines are built to fit into each country's existing policies, planning processes and institutions rather than replace them, so countries can adapt the tools, indicators and approaches to their own priorities and laws. The revision reflects three decades of change in the tools available: geospatial technology, digital information systems, land evaluation, multicriteria analysis and decision-support systems.
"Central to this is soil intelligence: combining soil data, mapping, monitoring and local knowledge to guide practical decisions on land use, production, restoration and investment," said FAO Deputy Director-General Beth Bechdol.
The guidelines set out a nine-step framework and put stakeholder engagement and transparent decision-making at the centre of planning. A Practitioners' Guide, still to come, will turn the nine steps into practical instructions. FAO drew up the text through a global consultation with its members, technical experts and partner organisations, and the FAO Committee on Agriculture acknowledged it at its thirtieth session (COAG30).
For farming, the stakes are the land and water that crops and livestock depend on. FAO presents the guidelines as part of its push for more efficient, inclusive, resilient and sustainable agrifood systems, and as a way to link work under the three Rio Conventions on biodiversity, climate and desertification with the Sustainable Development Goals.
Source: FAO Newsroom
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