These unsustainable land uses place enormous pressure on the land by altering its soil chemistry and hydrology. Eventually, overexploited drylands suffer from erosion, soil salinization, loss of productivity, and decreased resilience to climatic variations. Land management plays a particularly large role in highly populated regions of less developed countries, where population growth is placing increased pressures on marginal lands.
Global warming due to the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other gases emitted by fossil fuel combustion threatens to complicate this picture in the future. A rise in global temperatures is likely to accelerate the process of desertification as evaporation rates increase.
If you are using Internet Explorer 8, please view slideshow on Flickr. Skip to main content. They advise policymakers and the international community to: decentralize natural resource management, invest in agricultural research and development, and build local capacity for participatory programs to ensure clear property rights, legal protection, and enforcement of those rights; prioritize investments to scale up applied research, such as rigorous assessments of the economic costs of land degradation, and ensure collaboration across regions and among scientists, socio-economists, and policymakers; and follow models of influential global initiatives in related natural resource management areas, such as the Economics of Ecosystem Biodiversity study and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, involving all stakeholders in the process of global assessment.
Latest from this Blog Innovations to build reslience. The worst affected areas are likely to be the dry fringes of southern Iraq, Afghanistan, sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. To counter this, the authors call for coordination among ministries to encourage sustainable production and for the elimination of agricultural subsidies that promote land degradation.
They urge consumers to reduce waste and be more thoughtful about what they eat. Vegetables have a much lower impact on land than beef. Farmers are encouraged to raise productivity rather than clear more land. Companies and governments are advised to accelerate efforts to rehabilitate land. The economic case for land restoration is strong, according to the report, which says benefits such as jobs and business spending are 10 times higher than costs, and up to three times higher than price of inaction.
But in most regions, remedial work is overdue. National governments are not living up to a global commitment to neutral land degradation by Participants compared the rundown of land to the financial crisis. Now we are borrowing from nature at a rate that is many times higher than the world can sustain. The vast geographical distance between demand for consumer goods and the land needed to produce them — between, in other words, the cause of land degradation and its effect — makes it much harder to address the problem politically.
Sadly, the timid history of attempts to create global governance regimes over the past century — from human rights, to conflict prevention, arms control, social protections and environmental treaties — has seen more failures than successes. On the positive side, success stories in land management are well documented: agroforestry, conservation agriculture, soil fertility management, regeneration and water conservation.
In fact, the new report states that the economic case for land restoration is strong, with benefits averaging ten times the costs, even when looking at very different types of lands and communities of flora and fauna. A common feature of many of these success stories is major involvement by indigenous populations and local farmers.
And yet these achievements remain far short of the scope of the problem. Significant obstacles remain — including, according to the report, increasing demand for land, lack of awareness of the extent of land degradation, fragmented decision-making within and between countries, and increased costs of restoration as time goes by. However, whether these agreements will be successful in overcoming the obstacles mentioned above remains to be seen. Read more: If the world's soils keep drying out that's bad news for microbes and people.
What can we do as citizens, especially those of us who live in cities and have little direct interaction with the land?
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