ABSTRACT
Water resources are most indispensable for global management capacities combined with the need of sustainable, protective use for a most possible reduction of negative impacts to environmental and landscape resources in rural places. Water is a life enabling, protecting, and life creating resource. Therefore, while using the resource, it is essential to acknowledge the ecosystem services implementing standards of life quality, securing human wealth and health as well as securing individuals and communities’ landscape and rural environment.
Managing drought and therefore water resources for landscape and rural security is most important as already nearly 2 million people live on the 40%–41% of the total global land mass that is dry. It is estimated that 10%–20% of these dry lands have already been destroyed and are turning into deserts. Regions in Africa, south of the Sahara, and South Asia are facing extreme poverty and hunger.
The changing structures, values, identities, and functioning of landscapes and rural places, such as ecological sustainability and balance, are some of the results that lead to less secure water conditions, which is part of the discussion of this chapter. Next to this, the evolving challenges of further unsecured conditions in the standards of social, economical, cultural, ecological, and environmental life have to be directly correlated to purposes of landscape scale, regional level, and rural security, which will be highlighted in this chapter.
194Within the possibly happening tremendously destructuring processes of drought and further on processes to arid and desertificated land compared to regions worldwide, developing as well as developed countries have to fulfill in greatest engagement the aims of United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) until 2018 and beyond. The topic of this chapter is how to proceed in planning and management for fulfilling these aims of UNCCD in a most optimized way. So, it is getting possible to secure the worlds’ landscapes and rural security as being the agars liquor for an enduring sustainable future of human beings and life on planet earth—the one.
