With climate change impacts already felt in the world’s drylands, there is an urgent need for action, at various scales and initiated by different stakeholders, to ensure the sustainability of food production and livelihoods in these regions in the coming decades. There is also the need to rapidly establish baselines, assess and start monitoring progress on sustainability, emerging as result of the action taken. To aid in this effort, this paper provides a short list of expected transformations (under each of the three sustainability pillars) for guiding the planning and implementation of policy, governance and practice-level actions. The paper also presents case studies portraying actions that led to progress in sustainability and directly related to the expected transformations.