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Curbing Desertification
Today: A Prelude to Coping with Climate
Change
In recent weeks, farmers in Mexico have faced the country's
worse drought in 60 years; India's agriculture has struggled to
contend with a damaging delay in the monsoon; while the failure of
rains in eastern and southern Africa has pushed millions of poor
pastoralists and farmers to the brink of humanitarian disaster.
Unfolding just before the Ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9)
to the United Nations Convention on
Combating Desertification (UNCCD), held on September 21 to
October 2 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, those developments
demonstrate forcefully why it is urgent to halt desertification in
dry areas today, as a prelude to dealing with climate change
tomorrow.
The intercontinental drought catastrophe lent particular urgency
to a conference that took place in the framework of COP9, with 200
scientists attending from around the world. Titled
"Understanding Desertification and Land Degradation
Trends," the conference highlighted the need for science-based
methods to monitor and assess land degradation and for a holistic
approach, centering on sustainable land management, to thwart
desertification.
The first such event to be held in support of the UNCCD,
particularly as part of the official agenda of a COP, it was
organized by the Dryland Science for Development (DSD) Consortium,
in collaboration with the UNCCD Secretariat and its Committee on
Science and Technology (CST). The DSD Consortium unites five
organizations, including the International Center for Agricultural
Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and International Crops Research Institute for
the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT).
 The human face of climate change
Photo: ICRISAT.
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Among the hardest-hit victims of drought are the predominantly
poor inhabitants of drylands, accounting for more than a third of
the global population and about 40 percent of the world's total
land area, according to the 2005 Desertification Synthesis of the
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.
"The human face of climate change today is most evident in
the livelihoods of dryland people," said UNCCD executive
secretary Luc Gnacadja during the opening session of COP9.
Drought is a painful feature of those people's lives. And it
is also a key factor in the complex interactions between climatic,
economic and social conditions that drive desertification, or
severe land degradation, a process whereby land loses its
productive capacity.
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To reflect that complexity, many scientists prefer the
admittedly cumbersome term "desertification/land degradation
and drought," or DLDD, rather than just
"desertification."
As much as 20 percent of the land in the world's dry areas
has already succumbed to DLDD. And according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the problem will
undoubtedly get worse, as climate change results in the expansion
of dry areas - by an estimated 11 percent.
Among the immediate impacts of DLDD, as highlighted in the
Desertification Synthesis, are dramatic losses of biodiversity and
drastic declines in agricultural productivity. As a result of such
pressures, drylands can quickly lose their capacity to support
human livelihoods, thus deepening rural poverty and fueling the
social and political instability that is so common in these
areas.
"We must help dryland populations cope with drought and
curb land degradation now, if they are to have any hope of adapting
to climate change in the coming decades," said Mahmoud Solh,
director general of ICARDA and
chair of the DSD Consortium.
In addition to undermining human livelihoods, DLDD also shuts
down key environmental services, such as carbon sequestration.
Soils in dry areas are estimated to contain more than a quarter of
the world's total organic carbon stores. Yet, as these lands
are degraded, they release some 300 million tons of carbon into the
atmosphere each year, accounting for about 4 percent of total
global emissions. Moreover, the loss of vegetation increases
surface albedo, or reflection, as well as dust, which may affect
the climate locally and at the global scale, as demonstrated by the
massive dust storms that choked Sydney, Australia, recently and
that annually blanket Beijing, China.
"Counteracting DLDD through actions such as sustainable
land management can boost crop yields as well as carbon
sequestration, thus contributing importantly to climate change
adaptation as well as mitigation," noted William Dar, director
general of ICRISAT and chair of both the CST and the scientific
conference held at COP9. "That's why we need to view
drylands as agriculture's front lines in the global effort to
cope with climate change."
From principles to action
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The UNCCD is the only one of the three conventions resulting
from the 1992 Earth Summit that does not have its own monitoring
system. The climate change and biodiversity conventions, in
contrast, both count on integrated observation networks, which
greatly enhance these conventions' credibility.
"The lack of standardized, science-based methods for
monitoring and assessing DLDD has seriously hampered progress in
confronting this problem," explained Solh. "Ministers of
environment and agriculture, for example, don't have the data
needed to convince planning and finance ministers of the high costs
of doing nothing about land degradation - costs that are
devastating to the rural people and national economies of dryland
countries."
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"This conference was a landmark event for the
convention," said Dar. "It has helped lay the scientific
groundwork for more cost-effective action against DLDD by bringing
together state-of-the art approaches and by clearly charting the
way forward."
Eleven recommendations resulting from the conference outline a
"rigorous scientific framework for monitoring and
assessment," which would comprehend the social and ecological
dimensions of DLDD, draw on multiple sources of knowledge and
distill them into forms that decision makers can readily understand
and use at the national and local levels.
Scientists attending the event also emphasized the importance of
monitoring and assessing not just the DLDD problem but the wide
array of solutions that can be achieved through sustainable land
management. The results of such analysis are needed to inform
investors about options like the "bioreclamation of degraded
lands" approach devised by ICRISAT researchers for the dry
Sudano-Sahelian region of West Africa and ICARDA's integrated
research, using community-based methods, for rehabilitating heavily
degraded rangelands throughout North Africa and Central and West
Asia.
In one of the recommendations, scientists stress the need to
collect information revealing the strong relationships between
DLDD, climate change and biodiversity loss. Such information should
help identify opportunities to tackle all three problems through
approaches such as sustainable land management.
In addition, the scientists urge that economic modeling be used
to collect information on the economic, social and environmental
costs of DLDD. This could help dryland countries meet requirements
for receiving payments in exchange for environmental services.
Finally, to provide a credible focal point for monitoring and
assessment of DLDD, the conference called for the creation of a
scientific advisory mechanism that would be independent,
international and interdisciplinary. Such a mechanism would bring
together highly dispersed knowledge through networking with
scientists and other actors in drylands. It would also open clear
channels for bringing scientific advice to bear on the decisions of
the UNCCD and of national and local institutions, thus propelling
the principles of sustainable land management into action.
Useful Resources
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