Sustainable Land Management, an Approach to Overcome the Environmental Challenges of Agriculture

In recent decades, increase in the world’s population growth and challenges to maintain global food security has put a severe pressure on environmental resources. Although this pressure has provided relative food security in the short term, this pressure also has had a huge impact on the environment. Nowadays, the world is faced with many fundamental challenges for the sustainable production of food products. This issue has forced different countries to put sustainable agricultural development policies in their agenda. In this paper, sustainable land management (SLM) as a new approach to the environmental issues in agriculture has been discussed. The origins, history, principles, extents, and pillars of strategies as well as definitions of SLM are defined. In addition, maintaining or enhancing ecosystem services (productivity), reducing the level of production risk (security), protecting the potential of natural resources (protection), economic viability (viability), and social acceptability (acceptability) have been determined as the aims of a SLM system. To achieve these objectives, mechanisms and strategies including policy making, technology development, knowledge sharing and extension, prioritizing costs and expenditures, and determining appropriate methods of supplying financial needs have been recommended and discussed.