Over the last decades, increased pressure on the environment has globally led to non-adapted land management in order to keep up with food and consumption demands and in order to carry on making the best economic profit mostly neglecting that same environment counted on to provide these services. In certain already vulnerable areas this provoked over- and misuse of the land resource with land degradation as one of the direct consequences including the deterioration of soils and the many services they provide (Millennium Ecosystems Assessment, 2005; UNEP, 2007; Lal, 2009).

Soil resources from Africa and Latin America are crucial for meeting the foods, feeds, fiber and fuel needs of the rapidly growing human population. An outlook published in 2009 by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD-FAO, 2009) noted that current cropland area could be more than doubled by adding 1.6 billion hectares — mostly from Latin America and Africa — without impinging on land needed for forests, protected areas or urbanization (Nature, 2010). But several experts, such as the United Kingdom’s Royal Society (Royal Society, 2009), has advised against substantially increasing the extent of cultivated land, arguing that this would damage ecosystems and biodiversity.

One possible option to reach a win-win solution could be through a concept generally defined as “sustainable intensification”, which has become the priority of many agricultural research agencies. For instance, the FAO (OECD-FAO, 2010) forecasts that Brazil’s agricultural output will grow faster than that of any other country in the world in the coming decade (increasing by 40% by 2019). This increasing pressure on soil requires a precautionary approach to the management of this key resource in order to avoid, or at least to maintain within a sustainable threshold, the degradation processes.

Soil degradation is probably the best observable process of land degradation with a direct economic impact in agricultural areas. In Latin America, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) provided already several studies comparing agriculture productive output on comparable degraded and non-degraded lands and indicated that direct economic losses can easily reach 10-15 percent. Further to soil deterioration, land degradation evokes many more processes, including biophysical, such as decline in natural productive capacity due to vegetation cover and type change and socio-economic aspects, such as market response, policy strategies and levels of education and poverty. Very complex feedback mechanisms are at play to characterize the current status and trend of the land that is the most important bio-productive system to sustain humanity. Land degradation causing a general loss of productive capacity of the land is already affecting some 300 million ha of land in Latin America (UNEP, 2007).

Knowing where this happens and understanding the local individualities why it happens is crucial in outlining local and territorial land use and policy strategies. Promotion of sustainable land use programmes is best possible when there is proper knowledge on what the current or potential land problems are. EUROCLIMA is catalyzing this knowledge by inventorying the best available information with all partners and developing newly developed satellite based products.