Explainer: How can desertification affect us?

A major UN summit focusing on land restoration and drought resilience will soon take place in the Saudi Arabian capital, bringing together global leaders to negotiate and collaborate on addressing one of the planet's most pressing environmental challenges.

The event, the 16th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), is scheduled for December 2-13. Under the theme "Our Land, Our Future," nearly 200 parties, along with experts and civil society groups, will convene to call for urgent action to combat desertification.

Desertification is defined by the UNCCD as "land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry subhumid areas caused by various factors, including climatic variations and human activities." This process transforms once-productive land into desert-like landscapes, diminishing biomass productivity and reducing arable land, thereby threatening food security.

Though often a silent and invisible crisis, desertification destabilizes communities across the globe. While the impact is most visible in the form of dust and sandstorms, it also leads to biodiversity loss, rising unemployment, ecological displacement and even conflict.

The effects are already severe. According to the UNCCD, land provides nearly 95 percent of the world's food, yet up to 40 percent of global land is now degraded, directly affecting 3.2 billion people. Every second, an area equivalent to four football fields of healthy land is lost, totaling 100 million hectares each year. Additionally, droughts have become more frequent and intense, with a 29 percent increase in their occurrence since 2000. By 2050, three-quarters of the world's population could be affected by drought, the UNCCD warns.

Human activities also contribute to desertification, including unsustainable farming practices that deplete soil nutrients, mining, overgrazing and deforestation.

"We depend on land for our survival. Yet, we treat it like dirt," said UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, highlighting the urgency of addressing the crisis.

It is important to note that combating desertification does not mean eradicating natural desert ecosystems formed through geological processes over time. The focus is instead on restoring areas that have been degraded and should not have become deserts in the first place.

Natural deserts, like forests, grasslands and wetlands, play vital roles in maintaining the balance of terrestrial ecosystems. Therefore, the challenge lies in avoiding, reducing and reversing land degradation, which requires collective international action.

As the only legally binding international treaty focused on land management and drought, the UNCCD is one of the three Rio Conventions, alongside those addressing climate change and biodiversity. Over the years, it has successfully raised global awareness and mobilized global commitments to combat desertification, land degradation and drought. The convention also provides essential guidance, capacity building and resource mobilization to address these issues.

The upcoming COP16, which will mark the 30th anniversary of the UNCCD, will be the largest in the treaty's history and the first to be held in the Middle East and North Africa region. Delegates are expected to decide on collective actions to accelerate land restoration efforts, enhance resilience to droughts and sandstorms, restore soil health and scale up nature-positive food production by 2030 and beyond.

China, which hosted COP13 in 2017 and has been active in desertification control since signing the UNCCD in 1994, will engage in discussions on various agendas. The country is expected to contribute to the development of international policies and promote the use of Chinese technology to monitor and restore land resilience against global land degradation and drought, according to a briefing by the National Forestry and Grassland Administration.