Land degradation is a growing problem for not just climate change but food and water security. Why isn’t it getting more attention?The greatest threats to our existence today are caused by human activity rather than nature acting alone, according to a recent United Nations report.

Many people are familiar with human contribution to climate change and perhaps also the loss of biodiversity. But there’s a third environmental impact that rarely gets the attention it deserves: desertification, also known as land degradation.
The world is rapidly losing usable land for self-inflicted reasons, ranging from intensive agriculture and overgrazing of livestock to real estate development and, yes, climate change. The crisis is further fuelling food and water insecurity, as well as adding to more greenhouse gas emissions.

Environmental scientists haven’t ignored the problem. In fact, the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 led to the creation of three UN conventions: climate change, biodiversity and desertification.

The climate convention holds big COP summits each year — such as COP28 in Dubai — that now frequently make front-page headlines.

But while the biodiversity and desertification conventions also hold COP summits, they’re only once every two years and rarely get that much interest. It’s a lost opportunity, says Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, who hinted it could be a branding issue because people think it’s only about deserts.

“There is a misunderstanding of the term desertification. That’s why we also use ‘land degradation,’” Thiaw said.

Read further from the sources above