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The Anthropocene has brought with it many challenges, the primary of which are climate change and food security. The growing global population increasingly demands more from a shrinking resource base, while variable climate conditions make future provision uncertain. To address issues of low agricultural productivity and land degradation, conservation agriculture (CA) has been promoted in smallholder settings across Africa. CA is an agricultural package that consists of three key principles (minimum soil disturbance, mulching, and crop rotation) and its success depends on the simultaneous implementation of all three principles. However, CA has met with limited success. A scoping review was conducted to assess the barriers and enablers of CA for smallholder farmers in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) – a regional inter-governmental economic community. The scoping review included peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, reviews, and grey literature written in English that focused on the contextual links between CA adoption and the smallholder context, since 2015. Six electronic databases were consulted, and included records were charted according to a pre-defined data extraction form. A total of 66 records were included. A qualitative content analysis was performed. The findings indicated four central themes – physical resources, human resources, informational resources, and financial resources. The four central themes and their respective categories, detailing barriers and enablers, were combined to produce the Conservation Agriculture Suitability Framework for Smallholder Farmers. The review contributes to the knowledge base of the CA discipline and practice by revealing the contextual determinants of successful CA implementation. Ultimately, the success of CA in southern Africa will be underpinned by how well it fits into the broader smallholder farming system. • Climate variability and population growth in Africa has created vulnerability in the smallholder farming sector as well as food security challenges. • Conservation agriculture (CA) has been promoted to address these challenges but has seen low adoption rates and high disadoption rates. • A scoping review was conducted to assess the barriers and enablers of CA for smallholder farmers in southern Africa • Barriers and enablers are context specific, not universal, and are not unique to CA but are rather general constraints of smallholder livelihoods. • The CA Suitability Framework for Smallholder Farmers created to facilitate appreciation of the heterogenous smallholder context and promote incremental change through flexible and participatory approaches that accommodate local barriers and enablers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• South Africa successfully developed land degradation neutrality targets. • Biomes rather than land cover types form the fundamental unit of analysis. • Subjectively and objectively developed bassline data was combined for identifying priority interventions. • The global indicators proved problematic for identifying interventions. • Alien plant invasions and woody plant densification were the most pressing degradation problems needing intervention. South Africa undertook a national Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) target setting process during 2017/18 in response to the United Nations Convention to Combatting Desertification's call for signatory countries to voluntarily commit to LDN as also requested under Sustainability Development Goal 15.3. The process was supported by the Global Mechanism (GM) and followed their guidelines. This resulted in an ambitious set of targets being set for 2030. Early in the process it was recognised that biome level or landscape process based (bush encroachment, alien plant species removal) targets were more appropriate than location specific targets. South Africa has used the World Overview of Conservation Technologies and Approaches (WOCAT) Mapping Questionnaire (QM), to conducted two, ten years apart, assessments based on experts' perception of municipal level land degradation. The spatial location and extent of degradation, as identified from these studies, differed substantially from the three global indicators suggested as a baseline for LDN target setting. An analysis of the reasons for the discrepancies between the UNCCD indicators from the perception-based studies, and the implications this has for setting and monitoring South African land degradation is the main focus of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]