UN Report: Global Land Degradation Worsens Hunger

Reversing global land degradation can alleviate three big problems—the effects of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food insecurity, said a UN report, Elizabeth Pennisi reported for Science magazine,

Photo Insert: 40% of Earth’s land has been compromised by development, deforestation, farming, and other human activities.

The Global Land Outlook 2 from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) said that 40% of Earth’s land has been compromised by development, deforestation, farming, and other human activities.

But the report also offers a vision of benefits that could accrue by 2050 if humanity acts to restore landscapes and reverse this toll.

The report—a follow-up to a similar analysis released in 2017—stands out for several reasons, says ecologist Robin Chazdon. One is that it takes a synthetic, holistic view of a number of related problems, including protecting biodiversity, promoting sustainable farming and land use, and curbing climate change.

The report, however, describes a range of ongoing restoration efforts, such as Africa’s Great Green Wall tree planting project, and it notes that countries have already pledged to restore 1 billion hectares of land by 2030.

That’s a great starting point, one of the authors says. “When I started compiling [the pledges], I didn’t think it was anything close to 1 billion,” says Barron Orr, lead scientist at UNCCD.

The report paints a worrying picture of what could happen by 2050 if humanity fails to protect and restore landscapes.

Those outcomes include: Increasing agricultural and bioenergy demands will continue to degrade a land area of 1.6 billion hectares—the size of South America; increasing demand for food could lead to the loss of an additional 470 million hectares of natural area, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America; the productivity of natural, farm, grazing and pasture lands will decline by at least 12%, with sub-Saharan Africa affected the most.

Sixty-nine gigatons more carbon will be emitted over the next 35 years. The release of carbon from soil, peatlands, and vegetation contributes about 17% of annual carbon emissions.

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