The UNEP magazine for youth in English, French, Spanish language.
Did You Know Every dollar spent restoring degraded forests can result in $30 in economic benefits.

‘Forests precede civilization,’ it is said, ‘deserts follow’. It has been so since humanity first settled down
from a nomadic life. More than 3,000 years ago, Gilgamesh – the world’s first ever written story – warned against the cutting down of the cedar forests of Mesopotamia. It went unheeded and the region is now desert, with Uruk – the great city where it was written – no more than a bump in the sand.

Plato lamented how ancient Greece had been stripped of trees and soil, while the Mayan civilization of Latin
America also partly owed its demise to desertification.

Now the same process threatens much of the world. Land degradation affects one third of the Earth’s land
surface and endangers the health and livelihoods of over a billion people, more than one in every seven people on the planet.

Every year it makes 12 million hectares of land – an area
about the same size as Liberia or the state of Mississippi – totally
useless for cultivation, and much more is so impoverished that it
is no longer economically worth farming or grazing. Every year,
together with drought, it costs the world a massive estimated
$42 billion in lost production.
It blights most of the world’s drylands, which make up two fifths of
the Earth’s land surface and contain roughly the same proportion of
its cultivated land. And it threatens the health and livelihoods of
more than half their people. ‘Given the size of the population in
drylands, the number of people affected by desertification is likely
larger than for any other contemporary environmental problem,’
says a report by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year
global study by 1,300 experts from 95 countries.