Living Land

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tion’ which, when occurring in drylands, is labelled ‘desertification’.

These are driven by land use practices that turn exploitation into

overexploitation, sustainable into non-sustainable land uses, and

result in reducing rather than increasing land productivity.

Though the knowledge required for sustainable land use

exists through millennia of accumulated traditional knowl-

edge and centuries of scientific research, three interlinked

socioeconomic policy drivers currently combine to invoke the

drivers of land degradation — increasing global human popu-

lation size, increasing per capita calories consumption, and

increasing socioeconomic inequity.

These reflect on increas-

ing demands from, and pressure on, soil fertility and point at a

paucity of resources for averting the mounting threats of land

degradation by transporting knowledge and technologies to,

and effectively implementing them in, the developing world.

Though much knowledge for preventing land degradation is

available, means to detect and quantify it are controversial. A

quarter of the global land may be degraded

and the socioeco-

nomic and policy drivers of land degradation are intensifying;

hence the rest of the global land is at a risk of land degrada-

tion.

Furthermore, local soil erosion, a major driver of the land’s

productivity loss and the loss of vegetation cover, is also the driver

of off-site, transboundary detrimental impacts on non-degraded

lands — covering agricultural plots, blocking water reservoirs,

generating floods and dust storms and increasing water and air

pollution. Other social off-site impacts of local land degradation—

local poverty in degradation-affected areas causingmigrations and

refugees —may trigger foreign interventions.

Finally, the spatial

spread of land productivity loss, associated with the impaired soil

function of carbon sequestration, would undermine global food

security and global climate change mitigation, respectively.

Long before land degradation had become widely recognized,

many countries promulgated legislations and adopted policies

each addressing a specific driver of land degradation. In some

cases these increased rather than reduced land degradation,

and in most cases they have not explicitly targeted land degrada-

tion.

Furthermore, the United Nations Convention to Combat

Desertification (UNCCD) text obliges the parties to more effec-

tively implement and enforce the already existing policies and

states that only when these tools “do not exist”, “enacting new

laws and establishing long term policies” would be required.

Thus, in order to address land degradation holistically, land

degradation needs to be recognized as an interlinked syndrome

of global dimensions that requires global policy responses.

The opportunity for this came when the family of nations

under the auspices of the United Nations agreed upon interlinked

development-environment targets—reducing biodiversity losses,

mitigating climate change and alleviating poverty. These cannot

be acheived by setting targets that only address each of these

processes, since the state of soil and its backdrop of biodiversity

loss, climate change and poverty need to be addressed through

setting a land degradation target, ambitious and realistically attain-

able within a plausible time frame. This target, conceived at the

UnitedNations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20),

is the land degradation neutrality (LDN) target.

LDN is based on three observations. First, even though the

precise spatial dimension of degradation is not yet consen-

sual,

it is undisputable that degradation already prevails in

many areas.

Second, there is sufficient evidence derived from

time-series satellite images that degraded land continuously

accumulates,

a phenomenon projected to continue.

Third,

degraded soil can be rehabilitated such that land productivity

can be restored, as has been demonstrated by a number of

well-studied cases in non-drylands

and drylands.

LDN is achieved when, within the time period in which an

amount of non-degraded productive land becomes degraded, an

identical amount of already degraded land of the same productivity

potential is restored to its non-degraded state. In other words, LDN

can be achieved by offsetting the amount of land being degraded

each year through reclaiming land of equivalent area and produc-

tivity potential fromalready degraded land. This implies that when

LDN is achieved, land degradation has not been totally arrested,

but the amount of the domain’s productive land stabilized.

The direct quantifiable indicators of this target are conceptu-

ally (but not yet technically) straightforward: one is the area of

newly-degraded land and the other is the area of degraded land

newly restored, nominally and as proportions of the domain under

consideration. These values need to be compared for determining

the distance from the LDN target set for the LDNproject’s domain.

Thus, attaining the LDN target depends not only on success-

ful restoration, but also on the protection and management for

sustainability of the used land — both the restored land, and the

land not yet degraded but coming under use. Most important is

that attaining LDN is a cumulative process — when each region

within a country achieves LDN, the country as a whole becomes

land degradation neutral; furthermore, all countries combined can

strive to achieve a land degradation neutral world.

An LDN project requires an identification of the state of

land with respect to its productivity, a tool kit for applying

the appropriate land use practices for each state of land, and

a reliable system for monitoring the changes in these states.

These require the support of a global mechanism that assesses

the available science and technology, identifies knowledge

gaps and sets out to bridge them, and then interfaces them

to policymakers, to be eventually extended to the land users.

Identifying states of land use for a local LDN project

in a semi-arid watershed in Israel

Source: Uriel Safriel

Time

Productivity

Sustainable

cropland use

Degraded

rangeland

Degrading

cropland use

Sustainable

rangeland use

iving

and