This report contains the proceedings of the first stakeholders meeting held by the Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands (LADA) project, which aims to develop and validate quantitative reproducible assessment methods to make them widely available and to demonstrate and build capacity for their application in the dryland areas of the world. The print volume includes the meeting report and recommendations, an executive summary and the annexes, while keynote papers, country experiences, regional approaches and background papers are available on the accompanying CD-ROM.