Value Of Soil

The benefits of action against land degradation through sustainable management are seven times higher than its cost in 15 years

- Pushpam Kumar

LAND DEGRADATION and desertification are some of the greatest environmental challenges for the world in light of climate change, rapidly growing population and increasing demand for food, fiber and biomass energy. As the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says, land “provides the principal basis for human livelihoods and well-being, including the supply of food, fresh water, and multiple other ecosystem services, as well as biodiversity.” But the problem of land degradation and desertification is acute in Asia and Africa. Under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 15.3, a land degradation-neutral world by 2030 would not only depend upon the success of Africa and Asia to combat it, but the overall success would be critically determined by the success in achieving them in the two continents. UN agencies and the scientific community have been in a continuous discourse on identifying and generating empirical and scientific methods for monitoring, assessing and reporting the progress on land degradation and desertification.

In Asian countries, the degraded areas mainly include the deserts of China mainland, India, Iran, Mongolia and Pakistan; the sand dunes of Central Asia; the steeply eroded mountain slopes of Nepal; and the deforested and overgrazed high-lands of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Asia holds almost 60 percent of the world’s population. Of this, nearly 70 percent live in rural areas and depend directly on land and land-based ecosystem services. As a result, Asia is most severely affected by land degradation, desertification, and drought in terms of the number of people.