A solitary man and an ox cart travel across an area where locals went fishing less than a year ago in Damoguzhen County, Yunnan. 'The old folk say it has never dried up in their lifetimes.' Photograph: Jonathan Watts / Guardian

By Staff Writers
Aug 16, 2010 Fortaleza, Brazil (AFP) – The United Nations Monday launched a campaign to save the planet from deserts that are threatening a third of the planet along with the livelihoods of more than a billion people. The decade-long initiative aims to “reverse and prevent desertification” and to soften the effects of drought in affected areas “to support poverty reduction and environmental sustainability,” Luc Gnacadja, the executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, said. Parched land and deserts today are home to one in three people on Earth, or 2.1 billion people, 90 percent of whom are in developing nations. One billion people struggle to find enough food to survive in such inhospitable terrain. According to the UN, such land accounts for 40 percent of the planet’s land surface, and supports a third of all crops and half of all livestock. The proportions of the problem require a global response, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said. “More than two billion people live in the world’s drylands. The vast majority live on less than one dollar a day and without adequate access to freshwater,” he said. An area the size of Greece, or of Nepal, is lost every year to desertification and soil erosion, the world body said, equivalent to 42 billion dollars in annual income. Climate change is seen as the main cause of the phenomenon, a view reinforced by droughts and flooding in different areas of unusual intensity. … 

UN fights to save the planet from ever-expanding deserts