Half of the world's natural pasture land has been degraded, according to a new report from the United Nations, pushing existing ecosystems and food supplies to the brink.
What's happening?
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) released a report in May, revealing that as much as half of the rangelands that cover the earth have been overexploited. Population growth, urbanization, and increasing food demands have pushed farmers to raise more animals than can be supported by the land, per a report from Reuters.
Rangelands include savannas, wetlands, deserts, and grasslands, and make up 54% of all land on Earth. The increase has also led to more farmers converting natural pastures into cropland, which has caused damage to soil fertility and worse droughts.
Central Asia, China, and Mongolia are the worst hit, with Africa, the Middle East, and South America also suffering the effects. The previous estimate of degradation was at 25%, but the revised figure is closer to 50% based on updated data from over 40 countries.
Why is desertification important?
Desertification is the irreversible process of land and soil losing productivity, according to NASA's Earth Observatory, meaning it can't have the same plant growth it did in the past.
With those spaces in decline, one-sixth of the world's food supply is at risk, threatening the health, wellbeing, and livelihoods of billions of people in the long run. According to the United Nations, around 500 million people live in areas that have experienced desertification since the 1980s.
The damage to rangelands can also create a domino effect on environments with the loss of soil fertility and productivity. With less and less land able to support life of any kind, it can lead to worse climate change symptoms like droughts and fires.
The UNCCD reported last year that even the air is being impacted by desertification, as "2 billion tons of sand and dust now enters the atmosphere every year, an amount equal in weight to 350 Great Pyramids of Giza."
What's being done about desertification?
The news about the degradation of land sounds dire, but Barron Joseph Orr, UNCCD's chief scientist, indicated there is hope if governments work together to help rather than a more individualistic approach.
He also cited traditional practices that could help restore the land, telling Reuters, "In general, the way things were done in the past, traditionally, can go a long way towards the solutions that we're trying to achieve today. They worked for a long, long time and they can work again, given the right circumstances."
A recent example of adjusting the approach came from the Indigenous Zenú community in Colombia, which suffered major crop loss from the changing climate. They adjusted their farming approach to use ancestral corn varieties that are heat- and drought-resistant and saw an improvement in their food stores.
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