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The United Nations Conference on Desertification was the first time the nations of the world turned their concerted attention to a comprehensive plan to halt and reverse desertification. The global annual loss to desertification is in the order of 60,000 km. 2 It is man's action that degrades the land by misuse as he seeks to wrest a living from fragile ecosystems. A change to a more arid…

At its thirty-second session, the General Assembly, by paragraph 13 of its resolution 32/172 of 19 December 1977, invited the Governing Council of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to have prepared, by a small group of high-level specialists in the international financing of projects and programmes, a study of additional measures and means of financing for the implementation of the…

The Birth of International Land Governance. The 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment convened in Stockholm, Sweden, in the midst of severe drought in the Sahelian region of Africa. Between the late 1960s and the early 1980s, approximately 100,000 people died due to food shortages and disease. The drought led to fears the Sahel was turning into a permanent desert due to mismanagement of…

The explanatory note gives the criteria used for the different desertification classes distinguished on the accompanying maps. The climate-aridity index maps was composed from calculations of net radiation from about 3,600 stations, using the Budyko ratio as criteria. An experimental world scheme of aridity and drought probability was compiled by Kovda and explained in a table giving 14 classes…

Monograph on the MAB programme concerned with the development of semi-arid and arid zones - assesses the obstacles to development in the fields of animal husbandry, agricultural development, urban development, industrial development and tourism, provides proposals for these zones, mentioning irrigation, dry farming techniques and systematic use of trees, also refers to the transfer of technology…

The explanatory note gives definitions and explains degrees of desertification hazard. Criteria are given for the different bioclimates, distinguished on the accompanying maps. Four classes of vulnerability to desertification are considered: areas of sand movement, areas subject to stripping by deflation and/or sheetwash, areas subject to accelerated gully erosion, and areas subject to…