The rising threat of land degradation

Land degradation, along with climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, are the major environmental crises facing humankind.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) at its COP-16 meeting held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, recently released a report titled ‘The global threat of drying lands: regional and global aridity trends
and future projections’, which highlights the risks posed by land degradation and desertification to human and natural ecosystems.

The report reveals that about 78 per cent of the earth’s land has experienced drier conditions since the 1990s, compared to the previous 30-year period.

Over the same period, drylands expanded by about 4.3 million sq km, equal to an area nearly a third larger than India, the seventh largest country. Drylands now cover about 41 per cent of all land on earth, excluding Antarctica.

The number of people residing on dryland doubled from 1.2 billion in 1990 to 2.3 billion in 2020. Projections suggest that this may rise to 5 billion people by the end of this century.

Between 2007 and 2017, droughts affected more than 1.5 billion people globally, costing $125 billion.  About half of the world’s dryland inhabitants are found in Asia and Africa, including large parts of India and north-eastern China.

Climatic factors, especially the exponential rise in human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, and non-climatic factors, such as unsustainable land use practices, overexploitation of natural resources are major factors contributing to this rising trend of land degradation.

The adverse environmental and socio-economic impacts of increasing aridification, i.e. change of landscape from a wet to dry status, are immense, leading to food and water insecurity, rising poverty levels, poor soil fertility, losses in crop and land productivity, biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, intense sand and dust storms, wildfires, poor health and large-scale human migration.

Rising aridity has been blamed for a 12% decline in the gross domestic product (GDP) of African countries between 1990 and 2015. According to the UNCCD, droughts affect the livelihoods of 1.8 billion people worldwide and cost an estimated $300 billion per year, threatening key economic sectors and sustainable development.

Reducing the vulnerability of populations and ecosystems to aridity requires both broad and large-scale measures to mitigate global climate warming, and more regional or local approaches focused on vulnerable communities and countries. Poverty and limited economic resources can significantly increase vulnerability to climate change and aridity.

Undertaking vulnerability assessments to map populations and areas that are vulnerable to aridity is crucial for devising sustainable adaptation policies. The availability of financial resources, supporting governance structures, education, capacity-building, effective monitoring and reporting mechanisms are important.

There is also a need for sectoral adaptation approaches linked to sustainable agriculture and water management, as well as for education, awareness and governance of aridity and aridity responses.

For instance, in the food sector, adaptation efforts should focus on increasing the resilience of crop production to climate change by proper crop and water management, livelihood diversification and protection against losses, such as index-based insurance.

For the livestock sector, emphasis should be on adaptive practices, such as changes to livestock species, compositions and changes in grazing practices, such as switching to goats for dairy production, to ensure that livestock are more resilient to heat stress and adapted to desert or dry environments.

Given that crop production in drylands is largely rainfed, practices such as rainwater harvesting and water harvesting are crucial for increasing agricultural productivity without compromising water availability for other sectors.

Adaptation practices, such as regreening degraded landscapes, implementing sustainable land management (SLM) and forest restoration, can reduce risks from desertification by improving tree cover, which will reduce wind speed, prevent soil erosion and increase soil moisture.

There are a few good examples from around the world to promote sustainable land management. The Three North Shelterbelt Development Program (TNSDP), a progressive afforestation programme in China’s drylands, has helped accelerate large-scale greening of drylands in China with several environmental benefits.

Another regreening adaptation effort in the Sahel region of Africa began in response to the ongoing desertification in rural areas of southern Niger. Through this effort, about 200 million new trees have been raised in Niger, which has increased soil fertility, provided substantial amounts of biomass for household energy and enhanced food security for about 2.5 million people.

The Great Green Wall initiative in Africa aims to halt the advance of desertification and extend regreening efforts along the 8,000-km length of the pan-African Sahel Belt, from Djibouti to Senegal. The initiative has been successfully implemented in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan.

The UNCCD report provides a blueprint for a sustainable future in which proactive aridity and drought resilience measures are undertaken in synergy with measures that cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce land degradation, safeguard livelihoods, protect ecosystems and simultaneously encourage development for communities.

These include strengthening aridity monitoring and threshold identification; adapting a global to local aridity impact standard; integrating aridity adaptation and drought planning into national adaptation plans; implementing comprehensive and integrative strategies to combat land degradation and enhance drought and aridity resilience; and promoting cross-sectoral aridity governance and collaboration through the UNCCD.

The global nature of the aridity problem calls for international cooperation and ready access to funds and technologies for developing countries to implement SLM strategies.

Given that developed countries have failed to meet the financial targets of international environmental agreements, such as the Paris Climate Accord, prospects for any substantial financial commitments are not bright. However, it is gratifying to see that more than $12 billion was pledged at the COP meeting to tackle desertification, land degradation and droughts around the world, especially in the most vulnerable countries.

(The writer is lead author, GEO-7, United Nations Environment
Programme, Nairobi)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.