UNCCD Calls For A Shift From The Current "Age of Plunder" Toward An "Age of Respect" of Biophysical Limits

HAPPY WORLD SOIL DAY!

Roughly half of the world's surface area has been converted to land grazed by domesticated animals, cultivated crops, or production forests resulting in the loss of more than half of the world’s forests. 

Soil health can be defined as “the continued capacity of the soil to function as a vital living ecosystem that sustains plants, animals, and humans.” At present, land degradation and desertification are rampant threats to the sustainability of livelihoods, a phenomenon mostly experienced in drylands, which support over 44% of world food production.

Degraded dryland ecosystems increase vulnerabilities. Photo: Binh Thuan, Thien Anh Huynh/Vietnam/UNEP

Drylands are fragile ecosystems characterized by infertile soils and sparse vegetation cover and where average rainfall is counterbalanced by evapotranspiration. In 2000, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) estimated drylands to cover 40% of the global land surface. Recent studies (Huang et al., 2015) have shown that this figure will increase to 48% by 2025 and 56% by the end of the century. Such an expansion will further undermine soil's carbon sequestration potential and enhance regional warming. Land degradation and desertification will be exacerbated in drylands located in developing countries ''where 78% of dryland expansion and 50% of the population growth will occur under'' (Huang et al., 2015).

The UNCCD Global Land Outlook report published this year qualifies our current food system as inefficient, highlighting the current patterns of food production, distribution, and consumption as highly unsustainable. It criticizes the current agribusiness model which ''benefits the few at the expense of the many: small-scale farmers, the backbone of food production for millennia, are under immense stress from land degradation, insecure tenure, and a globalized food system that favors concentrated, large-scale, and highly mechanized farms'' (GLO, p.11).