Views /Opinion

‘When it comes to global sustainability, land is everything’

The 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) recently held in Riyadh, demonstrated that when it comes to global sustainability, “land is everything.”

There is a lot of global attention and discussions focused on the issue of climate change. These discussions focus on the need to mitigate the emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause it, as well as the urgent need to adapt to its worsening effects. 

Similarly, discussions regarding biodiversity and ecosystems, another major global environmental challenge, tend to emphasize the need to reverse the loss of habitats and ecosystems, with a mounting prominence on shifting the focus from “conserving nature” towards achieving “nature positive” outcomes.

Of course, both issues are strongly interrelated. The loss of forests and other carbon-rich ecosystems release carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, the principal greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. In turn, rising temperatures tend to negatively affect ecosystems by increasing heat stress and reducing water availability, thus contributing to the loss of these ecosystems. In other words, these issues are the two sides of the same coin: climate change negatively impacts ecosystems, while ecosystem loss accelerates climate change.

In most cases, the critical element linking the two issues is land. As ecosystems lose resilience and become more barren, they lose their ability to absorb and retain carbon, a phenomenon known as desertification. There are close to 1.5 billion hectares of land currently classified as degraded due to desertification, and each year an additional 100 million hectares (about the size of Egypt for comparison) becomes degraded. This growing trend impacts close to 3.2 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, and is more acute in regions affected by drought and poor land management.

This is precisely what the Convention to Combat Desertification seeks to address. Reversing the growing threat of desertification requires restoring ecosystems, and restoring ecosystems enhances their ability to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and retain it, thus contributing to the fight against climate change. This in turn restores soil fertility, which positively impacts agriculture and the wellbeing of rural societies at large.

The discussions in Riyadh covered a variety of technical and policy topics, all revolving around the need to restore lands and reverse desertification. By doing so,  we are simultaneously addressing climate change, as well as reversing the loss of biodiversity and ecosystems, and therefore contributing to restoring the health of Planet Earth. In other words, when it comes to global sustainability, land is everything.

Dr. Gonzalo Castro de la Mata, the Executive Director, Earthna Center for a Sustainable Future at Qatar Foundation shares his thoughts on the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) recently held in Riyadh.