Tag Archive for: Desertification

Regeneration International’s Perspective of the UNCCD COP15 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire

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Abidjan: On the 20 of May 2022, 196 countries ratified an agreement under the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification to neutralize land degradation and restore 1 billion hectares of land globally by 2030. Many experts see this as a vital target equivalent to the 2C global warming threshold of the UNFCCC Paris Agreement. Countries need to set themselves for new policies and frameworks to contribute to and sustain resilient landscapes in the era of anthropogenic climate change. However, from the perspective of the realities of the ground, it is not enough. Although reaching a consensus on a target is essential, on-field implementation plans are crucial to leverage countries toward their Land Degradation Neutrality (and reversal) goals – and regrettably, none were promised or put forward by any party during this COP. 

 

However, the conference broadly highlighted the importance of agroecology in tackling desertification, a first for the UNCCD COP. A draft statement on agroecology was made by civil society calling for agroecology to be funded and for states to provide better support for agroecological youth enterprises to facilitate access to land for women and young people.

 

A Gender Caucus was also led by the first ladies of Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Democratic Republic of Congo, underlined the importance of women’s rights, gender equality, land tenure security for women in agriculture.

 

With billions of dollars in aid and development from first-world countries for large-scale restoration initiatives such as the Great Green Wall launched by the African Union, many developing country representatives came together at COP15 to obtain funding for their respective programs. At the same time, civil society, scientists, and researchers who are working on the ground but are not at the center of the negotiations worked tirelessly to present and recommend scalable and mostly low-cost solutions adapted to local contexts of land, people, and climate. Sadly enough, many small NGOs invested a lot of time and resources to give statements in the plenary and present best practices for land-based, community-driven solutions and deserved to be given a pedestal on the front stage during the plenary sessions of the high-level segments. But unfortunately, they were everywhere but at the center of the UNCCD COP.

 

To match the COP’s theme “From Scarcity to Prosperity”, Regeneration International sent a small delegation to present Agave Agroforestry systems and the work of its sister organization Vía Organíca in San Miguel Allende in Mexico. Scheduled on a Friday evening after a whole week of the conference, we received a tiny yet tightly focused audience that thankfully saw some commitment and pledges to implement a scalable land regeneration project on a Great Green Wall program. 

 

Despite having a small crowd and an unpopular timeslot, we are very excited about this outcome. It can influence the whole Sahel region and provide ongoing support to farmer-led, assisted natural regeneration projects by helping dryland herders relieve livestock suffering from drought, famine, and lethal temperatures, rehydrate landscapes, and re-carbonize soils.
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During our event, we had interventions from Dr.Paul Luu, the Executive Secretary, and Claudia Schepp of the International “4 per 1000” Initiative. He highlighted the importance of Regeneration International’s work. In addition, he raised the vital need for Both RI and the “4 per 1000” to gain access to funding for scaling up regenerative agriculture globally through partners such as Vía Organica and the municipality of San Miguel Allende. 

 

Since 2007, 19 billion Euros have been injected into the Great Green Wall, and since 2021, France is providing another 14 billion Euros for its completion across 11 nations. So far, countries like Niger and Ethiopia have managed well to achieve their goals. Yet, many countries are challenged by social and political instability, unadapted policies, and corruption that sees enormous amounts of funding disappear into thin air before reaching anyone on the ground.

 

For land regeneration projects to be successful, sound community governance is essential, and the people on the ground need adequate resources and technical support, sustainable incomes, and access to land. 

In an exclusive interview with Sena Alouka of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), we discussed the Billions of US Dollars in Agricultural Development that mainly go towards conventional agriculture with modern technologies such as genetically modified seeds and chemical inputs, and machinery. How big funders are used to working with industry and not familiar with small-scale farmers. When organizations such as the World Bank, IFAD, and FAO define climate-smart agriculture practices as agroecological ones, it gets even more challenging for the real agroecologists to see any funding at all.

 

Governments and conventions aside, small hold rural farmers are the main ones who can ensure countries reach their pledges to restore land and fix the climate. In 2022 and beyond, Regeneration International is working with its partners for agroecology and regenerative organic agriculture to gain momentum and empower farmers in the developing world. Join the movement!

La COP15 logra el compromiso de 196 países de actuar ante la desertificación

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Los 196 países firmantes de la Convención de las Naciones Unidas de Lucha contra la Desertificación (UNCCD) se comprometieron hoy en Abiyán (Costa de Marfil) a actuar para impulsar la gestión sostenible del suelo terrestre, en la clausura de su decimoquinta sesión de la Conferencia de las Partes (COP15).

“Estas cuestiones son cruciales para la humanidad. Así que, más allá de los términos técnicos y las discusiones, se trata realmente de la vida, se trata de nuestro bienestar”, declaró este viernes el secretario ejecutivo de la UNCCD, Ibrahim Thiaw, en la rueda de prensa del cierre del foro.

“Y saber que el 40 % de la superficie terrestre del planeta ya está degradado por la actividad humana, creo que es una llamada a la acción”, agregó Thiaw, al señalar que se negociaron una treintena de decisiones en una atmósfera “extremadamente positiva”.

SEGUIR LEYENDO EN “SWISS INFO”

The Al Baydha Project: How Regenerative Agriculture Revived Green Life in a Saudi Arabian Desert

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Al Baydha is an area in western Saudi Arabia, about 20 miles south of Mecca.  It comprises nine villages inside of roughly 700 kilometers, and its inhabitants are Beduin tribes, who in centennial nomadic tradition, used to move across the land with the rainfall.  This, and other traditional land management methods used in the Arabian Peninsula, allowed the land to stay green for pasture; essential for the animals which are the basis for Beduin economy. But in the 1950s, those traditional systems were abolished.

The Beduin were obliged by law to settle in one area, a change that caused overgrazing and the gradual disappearance of native pasture.  The community was obliged to buy barley and hay for feed. To meet expenses, they chopped trees down for sale as charcoal.  Soon, the once-fertile land was nothing but rocky desert. Wells had to be dug further down to reach water, as the scant seasonal rains, with nothing to contain the water on the land, made flash floods that rolled away to the Dead Sea instead of seeping into the soil to replenish reserves.

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Experiencing a Healthy Ecosystem in Spanish Altiplano

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Author: Ashleigh Brown | Published: November 6, 2017

I have been in the remote area of the Murcian Altiplano for two months. It has been a life changing experience, living in an area so degraded. Every day the sheep walk past our bedroom window, followed closely by a huge cloud of dust that used to be fertile soil. You notice the dryness everywhere. My skin, hair, throat, everything feels parched, desperate for moisture. And the reasons for this dryness are everywhere too. Huge ploughs litter the farm, and it is a regular sight to see tractors, pulling these ploughs in the fields, also surrounded by huge clouds of dust.

All the life in the soil died long ago. Going for a walk around these parts is a surreal experience. It is often deafeningly quiet, it almost doesn’t seem real.

However, there are still small patches of land that have not been ploughed or over grazed. They are mini oases, where rivers flow, birds sing, butterflies flutter by, and wild boar roam. These patches give me a sense of what the damaged land could become, and motivate me to get up in the morning and continue with this mission.

Last weekend, we decided to venture into one of the largest patches of in-tact land in the area, a small mountain which the locals call ‘El Gato’ (the cat). We left the house just after dawn, and travelled as the sun rose to the foot of the mountain.

To get there, we had to walk across ploughed fields, with soil as pale and fine as sand. However, once we got to the foot of the mountain, Spanish Oak trees, surrounding by wild juniper, rosemary, thyme and a host of other plants were happily growing, giving homes to birds, insects, wild boar, squirrels, partridges, and more.

KEEP READING ON ECOSYSTEM RESTORATION CAMPS

Deforestation Drives Climate Change More Than We Thought

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Author: Lindsey Hadlock-Cornell | Published: September 6, 2017

Deforestation and use of forest lands for agriculture or pasture, particularly in tropical regions, contribute more to climate change than previously thought, research finds.

The study also shows just how significantly that impact has been underestimated. Even if all fossil fuel emissions are eliminated, if current tropical deforestation rates hold steady through 2100, there will still be a 1.5 degree increase in global warming.

“A lot of the emphasis of climate policy is on converting to sustainable energy from fossil fuels,” says Natalie M. Mahowald, the paper’s lead author and faculty director of environment for the Atkinson Center for a Sustainable Future at Cornell University.

“It’s an incredibly important step to take, but, ironically, particulates released from the burning of fossil fuels—which are severely detrimental to human health—have a cooling effect on the climate. Removing those particulates actually makes it harder to reach the lower temperatures laid out in the Paris agreement,” she explains.

She says that in addition to phasing out fossil fuels, scientific and policymaking communities must pay attention to changes in land use to stem global warming, as deforestation effects are “not negligible.”

While the carbon dioxide collected by trees and plants is released during the cutting and burning of deforestation, other greenhouse gases—specifically nitrous oxide and methane—are released after natural lands have been converted to agricultural and other human usage. The gases compound the effect of the carbon dioxide’s ability to trap the sun’s energy within the atmosphere, contributing to radiative forcing—energy absorbed by the Earth versus energy radiated off—and a warmer climate.

As a result, while only 20 percent of the rise in carbon dioxide caused by human activity originates from land use and land-cover change, that warming proportion from land use (compared with other human activities) increases to 40 percent once co-emissions like nitrous oxide and methane are factored in.

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Our Land. Our Home. Our Future

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Author: Monique Barbut | Published: June 17, 2017 

We all have dreams. For most of us, those dreams are often quite simple. They are common to individuals and communities all around the world. People just want a place to settle down and to plan for a future where their families don’t just survive but thrive.  For far too many people in far too many places, such simple dreams are disappearing into thin air.

This is particularly the case in rural areas where populations are suffering from the effects of land degradation.  Population growth means demand for food and for water is set to double by 2050 but crop yields are projected to fall precipitously on drought affected, degraded land.

More than 1.3 billion people, mostly in the rural areas of developing countries, are in this situation.  No matter how hard they work, their land no longer provides them either sustenance or economic opportunity. They are missing out on the opportunity to benefit from increasing global demand and wider sustained economic growth. In fact, the economic losses they suffer and growing inequalities they perceive means many people feel they are being left behind.

They look for a route out.  Migration is well trodden path.  People have always migrated, on a temporary basis, to survive when times are tough. The ambitious often chose to move for a better job and a brighter future.

One in every five youth, aged 15-24 years, for example is willing to migrate to another country. Youth in poorer countries are even more willing to migrate for a chance to lift themselves out of poverty. It is becoming clear though that the element of hope and choice in migration is increasingly missing.  Once, migration was temporary or ambitious. Now, it is often permanent and distressed.

Over the next few decades, worldwide, close to 135 million people are at risk of being permanently displaced by desertification and land degradation.  If they don’t migrate, the young and unemployed are also at more risk of falling victim to extremist groups that exploit and recruit the disillusioned and vulnerable.

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The High Price of Desertification: 23 Hectares of Land a Minute

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Author: Busani Bafana | Published: June 15, 2017 

Urban farmer Margaret Gauti Mpofu would do anything to protect the productivity of her land. Healthy soil means she is assured of harvest and enough food and income to look after her family.

Each morning, Mpofu, 54, treks to her 5,000-square-metre plot in Hyde Park, about 20 km west of the city of Bulawayo. With a 20-litre plastic bucket filled with cow manure in hand, Mpofu expertly scoops the compost and sprinkles a handful besides thriving leaf vegetables and onions planted in rows across the length of the field, which is irrigated with treated waste water.

“I should not be doing this,” Mpofu tells IPS pointing to furrows on her field left by floodwater running down the slope during irrigation. “The soil is losing fertility each time we irrigate because the water flows fast, taking valuable topsoil with it. I have to constantly add manure to improve fertility in the soil and this also improves my yields.”

Mpofu’s act of feeding the land is minuscule in fighting the big problem of land degradation. But replicated by many farmers on a large scale, it can restore the productivity of arable land, today threatened by desertification and degradation.

While desertification does include the encroachment of sand dunes on productive land, unsustainable farming practices such as slash and burn methods in land clearing, incorrect irrigation, water erosion, overgrazing – which removes grass cover and erodes topsoil – as well as climate change are also major contributors to desertification.

Desertification is on the march.  Many people are going hungry because degraded lands affects agriculture, a key source of livelihood and food in much of Africa. More than 2.6 billion people live off agriculture in the world. More than half of agricultural land is affected by soil degradation, according to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

It gets worse. The UN body says 12 million hectares of arable land, enough to grow 20 tonnes of grain, are lost to drought and desertification annually, while 1.5 billion people are affected in over 100 countries. Halting land degradation has become an urgent global imperative.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that by 2030 Africa will lose two-thirds of its arable land if the march of desertification — the spread of arid, desert-like areas of land — is not stopped.

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10 Million Hectares a Year in Need of Restoration Along the Great Green Wall

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Published: November 16, 2016

A groundbreaking map of restoration opportunities along Africa’s Great Green Wall has been launched at the UN climate change conference, based on collection and analysis of crucial land-use information to boost action in Africa’s drylands to increase the resilience of people and landscapes to climate change.

“The Great Green Wall initiative is Africa’s flagship programme to combat the effects of climate change and desertification,” said Eduardo Mansur, Director of FAO’s Land and Water Division, while presenting the new map at the COP22 in Marrakech.

“Early results of the initiative’s actions show that degraded lands can be restored, but these achievements pale in comparison with what is needed,” he added during a high-level event at the African Union Pavilion entitled: “Resilient Landscapes in Africa’s Drylands: Seizing Opportunities and Deepening Commitments”.

Mansur hailed the new assessment tool used to produce the map as a vital instrument providing critical information to understand the true dimension of restoration needs in the vast expanses of drylands across North Africa, Sahel and the Horn.

Drawing on data collected on trees, forests and land use in the context of the Global Drylands Assessment conducted by FAO and partners in 2015-2016, it is estimated that 166 million hectares of the Great Green Wall area offer opportunities for restoration projects.

The Great Green Wall’s core area crosses arid and semi-arid zones on the North and south sides of the Sahara. Its core area covers 780 million hectares and it is home to 232 million people. To halt and reverse land degradation, around 10 million hectares will need to be restored each year, according to the assessment. This will be major a contribution to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.

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Dispatch From the Chihuahuan Desert Grasslands

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[ English | Español ]

Author: Judith D. Schwartz | Posted on: August 19, 2015

A drive through Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert grasslands offers vast, near-boundless vistas—and a glimpse of a landscape in the balance. Passing the ejidos, communal farmland given to people as part of land reforms after the Mexican Revolution, one sees land with sparse annuals and brush and the occasional flaca vaca: a skinny cow, often barely alive. Then there are the huge tracts of brown, bare ground, where Mennonite farmers employ intensive agriculture.

My guide, rancher Alejandro Carrillo, has watched this landscape degrade, nearly in real time. “When I was growing up this was the best land in the area, with grama grass up to that wire,” he tells me, gesturing to an indifferent brownish weedy plot lined with waist-high fencing and dotted with random brush, a far cry from the lush pasture he remembers. The consequences of land deterioration throughout Mexico’s largest state have been devastating to local communities as well as to wildlife—particularly to migratory grassland birds that winter in the region and whose populations have plummeted, among some species more than 80 percent. And yet Carrillo’s ranch, Las Damas Ranch, is an oasis of bird life. Carrillo, who has holistically managed Las Damas Ranch since 2006 after leaving a successful career in IT, now works with bird conservation groups to create habitat for the endangered birds. He and several other ranchers who practice Holistic Planned Grazing have established research and conservation partnerships with organizations including the Rocky Mountain Bird Observatory, the American Bird Conservatory and Mexico’s Pronatura.

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Over-grazing and desertification in the Syrian steppe are the root causes of war

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Author: Gianluca Serra

Civil war in Syria is the result of the desertification of the ecologically fragile Syrian steppe, writes Gianluca Serra – a process that began in 1958 when the former Bedouin commons were opened up to unrestricted grazing. That led to a wider ecological, hydrological and agricultural collapse, and then to a ‘rural intifada’ of farmers and nomads no longer able to support themselves.

Back in 2009, I dared to forecast that if the rampant desertification process gripping the Syrian steppe was not halted soon, it could eventually become a trigger for social turmoil and even for a civil war.

I was being interviewed by the journalist and scholar Francesca de Chatel- and was feeling deeply disillusioned about Syrian government’s failure to heed my advice that the steppe, which covers over half of the country’s land mass, was in desperate need of recuperation.

I had just spent a decade (four years of which serving a UN-FAO project aimed at rehabilitating the steppe) trying to advocate that livestock over-grazing of the steppe rangelands was the key cause of its ecological degradation.

However, for the Syrian government’s staff, it was far too easy to identify and blame prolonged droughts (a natural feature of this kind of semi-arid environment) or climate change (which was already becoming a popular buzzword in those years). These external causes served well as a way to escape from any responsibility – and to justify their inaction.

In an article on The Ecologist, Alex Kirby writes that the severe 2006-2010 drought in Syria may have contributed to the civil war. Indeed it may – but this is to disregard the immediate cause – the disastrous over-exploitation of the fragile steppe ecosystem.

Before my time in Syria, as early as the 1970s, international aid organizations such as the UN-FAO had also flagged the dire need to not apply profit-maximization principles and to therefore not over-exploit the fragile ecosystem of the Syrian steppe.

KEEP READING IN THE ECOLOGIST