Desertification driving mass migrations – up to 700,000 migrate from Mexico drylands every year

By Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD Executive Secretary
Special for the Herald Climate change, food security, migration, poverty and peace. Nowadays, it seems that not a day goes by without a news report on one or all of these issues. These issues are also a big part of the current international political agenda. The question that almost always follows each report is how we can tackle each problem. That question, in my view, is part of the problem. Why? Like the human web, these problems are tied together. This means that dealing with each problem at a time makes us only partially effective and globally ineffective. … So, land use has an impact on climate change, but on the other hand, climate change has a negative effect on land. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported, with a very high degree of certainty, that climate change would lead to longer and more intense droughts in drought-prone areas. It also predicted that droughts would emerge in new areas, especially in the warmer tropical areas. These expectations are already evident. Critical sources of water such as Lake Chad in Africa are drying up and the water levels of major rivers such as the Euphrates, the Tigris and the Nile have fallen below what local populations are used to, compared to similar periods in the recent past. Intense and longer droughts are also already evident in parts of Southern Africa, as well as in North America, Australia and southern Europe where forest fires have caused great devastation. The experts tell us that drought-related effects can be minimized through sustainable land management. Investments to improve water management and assure it is available in the long-term combined with efforts to improve soil quality have immediate and spill-over rewards. In the short term, the impact of extreme weather conditions can be reduced and land fertility enhanced. The idea is compelling from an economic point of view considering the high costs of recoveries from drought. For example, the droughts of 1990 and 1999 cost Spain 4.5 billion and 3.2 billion US dollars respectively. China’s drought of 1984 cost the country close to 14 billion US dollars, the highest expense on record from drought to date. In essence, early intervention through sustainable land management can mitigate the effects of drought, and, in turn, its related effects.

There are two other significant spill-over benefits that the international community can reap from sustainable land management. Although the data is still patchy, some studies show that a significant part of the rural-to-urban- as well as international migrations are linked to desertification/land degradation and drought. As an example, between 400,000 and 700,000 people migrate from Mexico’s drylands to the cities and to the United States every year. This means that if the root of the problem, land degradation, is attended to before local communities get desperate, the push factors of migration could be reduced to a minimum. This can become a long-term solution if sustainable land management is designed so that producers are able to obtain decent incomes for their labor. In turn, this would enable households, communities and governments to achieve food security. At present, a major push for action on climate change is driven by notions such as the loss of the polar bear and other forms of biological diversity, as well as its effects on future generations, not least the possibility of conflict. However, the human face of climate change today is reflected in the livelihoods of the people in the drylands. For many developing countries up to 60 per cent of their populations depend on land for their livelihood. Therefore, sustainable land and water management, as well as land rehabilitation are not simply efforts at adaptation. They also constitute one of the most relevant nationally appropriate mitigation approaches to climate change. As such, for many developing countries, sustainable land management is an avenue to both generate sustainable economic growth and alleviate poverty. …

Land degradation, the root of the problem of a common thread