Creating an enabling environment for land degradation neutrality—an approach that counterbalances the expected loss of productive land with the recovery of degraded areas—can help ensure food security, energy needs, land tenure, gender equality, access to clean water, and biodiversity are considered and meaningfully addressed together.

Devotha Tumainieli farms on the steep western slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. She has a small plot of two hectares where she grows bananas for her family and as a cash crop. But over the past decade the productivity of Devotha’s land—and that of other farmers around her—declined dramatically, almost to the point where her family began to starve (GEF, UNDP & UNCCD, 2017, pp. 20-21).

Land degradation such as this occurs when land cover is lost or removed, causing vulnerable soil and organic matter to be washed or blown away. Salinization of soil can produce similar effects, reducing land productivity. The symptoms are many and alarming: expansion and movement of sand dunes, diminished rainfall, depletion of pastureland, erosion from wind and rain, and loss of biomass and biological integrity.

The resulting human suffering is severe. For farmers like Devotha, this means greater food insecurity and financial hardship.

People have long depended on the land and the resources it provides to meet their basic needs and support their families. At the same time, population growth, unsustainable consumption, intensive agricultural practices, the use of damaging extractive or mining technologies, growing conflict over rights to land, forced migration of people, and climate change are pushing the planet to its limits, causing land degradation on a vast scale (GEF, UNDP & UNCCD, 2017, p.3). In economic terms, the World Bank calculates global land degradation to cost USD 85.8 trillion annually (Reinl, 2019).
Concerns about, and efforts to address, land degradation are not new. During the colonial era in West Africa, government officials identified a process that soon became known as “desertification” and started to prioritize conservation efforts to address it (Tal & Cohen, 2007, p.163). In the 1930s, the southern plains of the United States suffered massive soil erosion due to inappropriate farming methods and drought during the “Dust Bowl.”

Today, 25% of the total land area across the globe is degraded. While 3.2 billion people are directly affected by land degradation, especially smallholder farmers and rural communities, millions more are affected through food insecurity, higher food prices, climate change, environmental hazards, and the loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Scientists have warned 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost each year, largely due to unsustainable agriculture practices. If this trend continues, 95% of the Earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050 (GEF, 2019). The international community has been trying to combat land degradation and desertification for decades, but challenges remain.

Five years later, the UN Conference on Desertification (UNCOD) convened in 1977 and adopted a non-binding Plan of Action to Combat Desertification (PACD), which aimed to improve land-use practices and social and economic welfare at the national level and in rural areas and local communities (Kong, et al., 2021). The PACD’s 28 recommendations acknowledged the local specificity of desertification and the need to incorporate rural land users when planning policy responses (UN, 1977, p. 5).

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