The UNCCD places “humans at the centre of concerns to combat desertification and to mitigate the effects of drought” (UNGA, 1994); and the second and third objectives of the UNCCD Strategic Framework for 2018-2030 aim, respectively, to “improve the living conditions of affected populations”, and to “mitigate, adapt to, and manage the effects of drought in order to enhance resilience of vulnerable populations and ecosystems” (UNCCD, 2017a), (Figure 1).

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), also recognised that to achieve the goals of sustainable development it is necessary to work to reduce the high prevalence of debilitating communicable, and
noncommunicable diseases, and to ensure populations are able to reach a state of physical, mental and social well-being (UN, 2012).

A sustainable and equitable development regarding land and water management, combined with measures of climate change mitigation and adaptation, at local and global levels, will facilitate the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially, in order to improve nutrition and human health, and reduce poverty (UNCCD, 2017b). Progress towards SDG 3 (health) and SDG 15 (land) will also contribute to accomplish the other SDGs.

In recent decades, human activities have had a substantial global effect on the Earth’s systems. This rapid change has been called the Anthropocene (Whitmee et al., 2015), a period in which trends of contamination and ecosystem disruption have grown exponentially. Paradoxically, during this same period, human health has improved. This
is mainly due to advances in public health, and other factors such as, inter alia, education, technological development, human rights legislation, and poverty reduction.

It is unclear at what point in time health will no longer be sustainable. For example, providing food to over 7 billion people with projection to increase to over 9 billion in the near future (in 2050) is a challenge when land and water availability is under increasing pressure (UNCCD, 2014a; Whitmee et al., 2015).

There is a high cost associated with DLDD. UNEP (2019) estimates the annual cost of land degradation and desertification at USD 127 billion. Developing interventions to protect biodiversity and ecosystems by avoiding land degradation and implementing land restoration interventions will contribute to the achievement of the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs), as well as to the improvement of human health and wellbeing (IPBES, 2018). Similarly, interventions in the health sector are needed to protect and promote physical and mental health linked to DLDD (Sena et al., 2017).