In 1997 the United Nations General Assembly held a special session on the global environment, Rio+5. During this session a set of priority actions was announced by the World Bank Group, including increased activities on issues such as desertification and land degradation, which are to be delivered through a revitalized rural strategy. Some key components of this new strategy are sustainable agricultural development, conservation of natural resources, and promotion of sustainable land management, including the development of indicators and procedures for monitoring the impacts of rural development policies and programs on the productivity and quality of land resources (World Bank, 1997).

This bibliography is an important building block for global and national programs on sustainable land management. Since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit (UNCED), there have been innumerable attempts to develop indicators, a virtual "indicator factory," but with little or no coordination. Starting in 1992, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, along with the International Board for Soil Research and Management (IBSRAM), the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the International Society of Soil Science, began to develop the concept of sustainable land management. In 1995 the World Bank Group established a global coalition with the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), U.N. Development Programme (UNDP), FAO, and Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) to develop and test indicators of land quality. These institutions took the lead in producing this annotated bibliography, which assembles and organizes the available scientific information on indicators of land quality and sustainable land management to make these data more user-friendly and accessible to those who need it. These indicators are intended to help monitor whether human interventions in the landscape are leading toward or away from sustainability.

This bibliography includes selected publications and reports from the international literature, as well as some of the most useful URL sites on the World Wide Web (WWW). It represents a considerable volume of work, but much remains to be done. On behalf of our partners, I invite others to contribute their knowledge and experience and to join this initiative to develop improved indicators and procedures for monitoring and evaluating sustainable land management.

Ismail Serageldin
Vice President
Environmentally and Socially
Sustainable Development Network