Priority Areas

Sustainable land management (SLM) refers to practices and technologies that aim to integrate the management of land, water, and other environmental resources to meet human needs while ensuring long-term sustainability, ecosystem services, biodiversity, and livelihoods. SLM is crucial to minimizing land degradation, rehabilitating degraded areas and ensuring the optimal use of land resources for the benefit of present and future generations.

SLM enables farmers to intensify existing land more sustainably, enhancing productivity without degrading land resources. SLM is thus a key element in international goal of sustainable development.

Some areas of land are already seriously degraded in Eswatini, and some irreversibly so. This includes large areas of cropland, grassland, woodland and forest areas whose degradation reduces productivity, disrupts vital ecosystem functions, negatively affects biodiversity and water resources, and increases vulnerability to climate change. Land degradation is a widespread and growing problem that can only be tackled through coordinated and collaborative approaches and targeted programmes and action.

SLM encompasses established approaches such as soil and water conservation, natural resource management and integrated landscape management. A number of projects that have been supported by the Fund in the past include:

• Land degradation projects.
• Run-off water management