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Between 1981 and 2003, nearly a quarter of global land got degraded, says UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw. The great Roman Empire collapsed because of, among other things, the desertification caused by deforestation and land degradation. Today, 169 countries in the world face the impact of land degradation. In the 25th year of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification …

Although anthropogenic climate change is expected to have caused large shifts in temperature and rainfall, the detection of human influence on global drought has been complicated by large internal variability and the brevity of observational records. Here the authors address these challenges using reconstructions of the Palmer drought severity index obtained with data from tree…

According to the U.N. and World Bank, 40 percent of the global population is affected by water scarcity, and by 2030, up to 700 million people could be displaced as a result. Having spent his youth spent living through a series of droughts and famine, Ibrahim Thiaw is not only a face to these numbers but also on a mission, as Executive Secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat…

The past 50 years has seen unprecedented exploitation and destruction of the land, which produces the food that sustains each and every one of us. Over one third of the earth’s land is severely degraded and fertile soil is being lost at the rate of 24 billion tonnes a year, in part due to unsustainable agriculture and climate change. Not only is fertile land becoming unusable, it is…