Mongolia

Enhancing rural livelihoods depends on eliminating rural poverty. While rates of rural poverty have decreased in recent years, extreme poverty still poses a major challenge in rural areas, especially in countries such as South Sudan, Honduras, and Zambia, where over 50% of the rural population lives below the national poverty line. Reducing rural poverty is particularly important in the context of climate change, since climate-smart, resilient agriculture can require significant up-front investments, expensive inputs, and higher implementation costs – additional expenses that many farmers, particularly smallholder farmers, cannot afford without additional income or financial support.

Policies and programs to make agricultural production more sustainable must be paired with broader interventions to alleviate hunger and food insecurity, working towards the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2.1 to ensure all people have access to safe, nutritious, and sufficient food all year round by 2030. Unfortunately, since the development of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015, the prevalence of moderate or severe food insecurity has been moving in the wrong direction. As of 2022, 2.4 billion people (30% of the global population) were moderately or severely food insecure. This number has remained steady since 2020, after increasing significantly between 2019 and 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Lack of secure land tenure is pervasive worldwide and is a commonly identified barrier to shifting to profitable, sustainable agriculture, and to restoring forest and land ecosystems. Documentation of rights contributes to tenure security and can create incentives for farmers to make longer-term investments in their croplands. Rights that are secure and of a set duration can also be the foundation for investing in restoration efforts where the benefits accrue over time. Yet, in countries where deforestation and forest conversion for commodity agriculture are a pervasive problem, such as Indonesia and Cote d’Ivoire, less than half of all adults have legal documentation of their rights to land.

Secure land rights play an essential role in enabling the restoration of ecosystems; defending lands that are under threat; supporting the development of profitable, sustainable agriculture; and reducing vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. In addition to formal documentation of land rights, communities and individuals need assurances that their land rights are secure and that they will accrue the benefits of, for example, improving cropland and pasture productivity, reestablishing trees, rewetting peatlands, or restoring mangroves. Without believing that they have long-term rights to land, they may have little incentive to devote their time, labor, and resources to such projects, particularly those that generate benefits over longer periods of time. Yet nearly one billion people worldwide believe they could lose part of their land or their right to use it within five years.

Herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides are used globally to enhance crop yields and promote food security. Despite their utility, pesticides also pose risks to human health (especially to farmworkers and surrounding communities) and the environment (e.g., biodiversity loss, air and water pollution). The quantities of pesticides used per area of cropland can be used as a proxy to monitor potential overuse of pesticides. This indicator assumes that the more pesticides are used, the greater is the risk of adverse outcomes for human health and the environment. However, the indicator is unable to account for how the risk of pesticide overuse differs across the world, dependent on regional conditions (including biodiversity levels and water scarcity), the compartment of the environment that is affected (e.g., air, soil, water), and the type of pesticide considered. Globally, pesticide use per area of cropland has been increasing rather than decreasing, rising 27% from 2000 to 2021.

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