Sustainability of agroecosystems is the most challenging task for humans in this anthropocentric era. The faulty agriculture practices and several undesirable anthropological factors caused substantial soil erosion, desertification, and soil dryness, resulting in a severe decline in soil biodiversity and crop productivity. The mismanagement of agriculture land has deteriorated around 25% of the world’s total land area, resulting in the annual loss of approximately 24 billion tonnes of soil. By 2050, 95% world’s land might be degraded if current trends continue. The tillage practices are responsible for more than 150 t ha -1 of annual soil loss around the world. Soil erosion is responsible for 40% of all soil deterioration worldwide. Agricultural land degradation is mainly caused by intensive soil ploughing, removal or burning of crop leftovers, poor pasture management, and insufficient crop rotations. Conservation Agriculture (CA) practices are essential for soil quality restoration and improvement. The global annual adoption rate of CA has been 7 M ha year -1 over the last ten years. By decreasing soil erosion, maintaining soil structure, and encouraging soil organisms, by using CA practices, Brazil has stored around 12 million tonnes of carbon from 23.6 M ha of land. The regenerative CA practices are also important to the achievement the sustainable development goals (SDGs). This review seeks to gather and provide collective literature on the global agroecosystem situation and the impact of CA methods in restoring our degraded agroecosystems for food security.

The ravine is considered as the worst manifestation of land degradation by water erosion throughout the globe. About 120.7 M ha land in India, suffers from various forms of land degradation, out of which 3.67 M ha of land is affected by ravine. The extending ravine into the nearby 50 m of buffer zone tends to deprive the farmers of their occupations forcing them to work as landless laborers for their livelihood. Ravine reclamation is a cost intensive activity, due to which it is financially not feasible to go for reclamation in the entire ravine lands, simultaneously. Therefore, there is a need to identify the potential zones of reclamation for planning of reclamation work in a phased manner. In this study, an innovative hybrid approach was used for development of ravine vulnerability index for Mahi ravine in Western India. The potential zones or active sites in the 50 m buffer zone of the delineated ravine covering an area of 63031 ha was identified for reclamation works. The spatial database was used for preparation of raster layers using Arc GIS 10.3 software. The sand, silt, clay, organic carbon, soil erodibility factor, slope, stream power index, topographic wetness index, sediment transport index and cover factor were identified as important parameter for development of ravine vulnerability index. The weights were assigned to different parameters in pairwise comparison on the scale of 1 to 10, based on the relative importance of the each parameter with respect to another in the decision matrix of analytical hierarchical process. The number of iterations were made to obtain the consistency ratio less than 10% to obtain the final priority weights of each parameter. The priority weights obtained for each layer was then assigned in the raster calculator in the Arc GIS interface. The highest weight of 28.5 was obtained for sand parameter and minimum weight of 1.4 for sediment transport index parameter. The ravine vulnerability index validated through ground truth shows that 16703 ha (26.50%) area of Mahi ravine in Western India was found be under very high priority and was identified as potential zones or active sites for reclamation. The land capability classification for reclamation of the Mahi ravine in Western India shows that 20275 ha (32.16%) area of arable land falls under Class-III followed by 18687 ha (29.65%) of non-arable land under Class-VI for suitable soil and water conservation measures.