Success or failure in preventing land degradation and restoring degraded land is not a question of a lack of knowledge. Information from global sources is out there, but a key challenge is ensuring that scientific and practical knowledge reaches the land users, communities and policy-makers who can make the difference between success and failure. The UNCCD Secretariat is currently developing the Scientific Knowledge Brokerage Portal (SKBP) to bridge the gap between global knowledge sources and communities around the world that need to apply and adapt these locally.
The new pilot will link existing information resources and provide a search tool that centralises case studies, local knowledge and bibliographic records on solutions to land degradation. “The SKBP will simplify and consolidate the process of retrieving knowledge,” explains UNCCD Knowledge Management Officer Rita M. Benitez.
The pilot has two main entry points. First, global maps about sustainable land management resources by country and by managing entity will connect users to existing knowledge bases. A click on Peru, for example, opens a pop-up window displaying three knowledge bases, their descriptions and links. This first level of the SKBP is already operational in a small-scale pilot version, which has been up and running since 17 July 2014. The interactive web maps were developed in cooperation with the Jornada Dryland Research Program of the United States Department of Agriculture – Agricultural Research Service (USDA-ARS) which continues to support access to these maps.
The second component is more complex. It is a search portal that allows searches by topic, location, causes of land degradation, and other criteria relevant to land degradation. Users will be able to access the content databases provided by SKBP Pilot partners, who are leaders in collecting relevant data and have made their repositories available to the SKBP.
What’s the added value?
A recent Google search for “land degradation and sustainable land management practices” delivered 770,000 results. However, most of these search results do not provide the contextual information that a land manager will need to deal with land degradation on his or her farm and answer questions such as: “Where has this solution been implemented or where might it be applicable? Which cause of land degradation does it address? When was this source published?” Policy-makers will also need to do some careful analysis of search results to draft policies to prevent or halt land degradation in their countries.
People seeking practical land management information are often unfamiliar with international resources and may not succeed in finding suitable information sources, or may be excluded from them by user registration or other interface requirements. “Rather than exploiting a two-way traffic flow of knowledge from researchers, local communities and CSOs, policy-makers often find themselves in the middle of a knowledge “traffic jam” with nothing moving in either direction. Under such circumstances, many simply reach for the information that is closest to hand, whether or not it is the most relevant, reliable or up-to-date,” according to stakeholders in the DESIRE project, which promotes alternative land use and management conservation strategies. The SKBP will limit content sources to those relevant to land degradation and will utilise search technologies made available by Search Technologies during the pilot phase to help users find responses to land management problems that may be named differently across participating knowledge bases.
The UNCCD is also keen to model the SKBP Pilot as a platform for local and regional knowledge exchange. The pilot aims to serve as a platform through which global communities can adapt examples of successful land management practices to other regions with similar conditions. To ensure that language is not a barrier, the search portal component of the SKBP Pilot has been developed using Google’s open-access translation tool, which supports 80 languages.
Upstream information flows?
SKBP Pilot partners can eventually also benefit from this initiative. With so many competing global needs, it’s sometimes hard for sustainable land management knowledge providers to know which information land managers actually need. In order to better align supply with demand, a more mature version of the SKBP Pilot will aim to offer its partners information on user search trends, user site behaviour and general information needs.
Fine-tuning in time for the big decision
The project’s pilot phase successfully ended in August. “The SKBP Pilot, consisting of interactive web maps containing over 200 knowledge bases and a functional search portal prototype, provided us with important insights into the portal’s long-term running costs, technical requirements and the conditions required to support knowledge-sharing partnerships,” says Rita M. Benitez.
So what’s next? A presentation about the SKBP Pilot is planned for the UNCCD Conference of the Parties in Turkey in 2015, where a decision will be made on how the SKBP may be further developed in 2016.
The SKBP Pilot is an example of how the UNCCD aims to broker land degradation resources, bringing together information providers and users to support implementation in the field. In the long term, land users, practitioners and country Parties confronted with land degradation challenges will determine the extent to which the SKBP can support their needs. Based on reactions at CST-11 in Windhoek, many country Parties envisage that examples of good practice from other parts of the world will inspire cross-country collaboration and increased action at the front line against land degradation.
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