1. Situation and Problems in Water Resource Management and Environmental Conservation

What is marginal land? Marginal land is the regions that are ecologically fragile but have high density of population. High population pressure on fragile ecological environment is the most important characteristic of marginal land. Most marginal areas are facing serious conflict between improvement of human well-being and environmental conservation. Especially coordination of water resource management and land degradation prevention is a severe challenge to sustainable development as most of marginal areas are arid land. There is about 25 % of population living on fragile lands in the world. In Sub-Saharan, Middle East and North Africa, East Asian and pacific and South Asian, more than 24.4 % of population are living on fragile lands (Table1). Most of these areas are arid land. These fragile lands and the Southern Plains of North America face similar climatic and soil characteristics but different political, financial, and institutional constraints (World Development Report 2003). Another important point is different density of population between the fragile lands and the arid land of North America. The dense population living on these marginal lands depends upon dryland agriculture. Table1 Regional distribution of people living on fragile land in 2000 Population on fragile lands by regio