World Day to Combat Desertification: UN SG Calls for Restoration of 100 Million Ha Degraded Land

UN Secretary General, António Guterres, has prescribed the restoration of 100 million hectares of degraded land, as a key requirement for maintaining food security, keeping households afloat and creating jobs. Speaking on the heels of the 2020 World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, commemorated, June 17, the world over, the UN boss said “such efforts will bring back biodiversity, reduce the effects of climate change and make communities more resilient”. 

Calling for “a new contract for nature”, Mr. Guterres underscored the need to scale up land restoration and nature-based solutions for climate action and the benefit of future generations through international action and solidarity.  He noted that 70 per cent of the world’s land has been transformed by human activity, with some 3.2 billion people in the world affected by land degradation.

Drought and desertification are more than ever before strangulating the health and wellbeing of humanity across the globe, with the fingers of environmental experts pointing at anthropogenic inputs and or human consumption and production patterns including but not limited to deforestation, overgrazing, bush burning, unsustainable fuel wood extraction and urbanization.

Little or small wonder that the theme of this year’s World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought is Food, Feed and Fibre-the links between consumption and land. This theme more or less depicts man’s insatiable quest to sooth the increasing demand for food, animal feed and fibre powered by rapid industrial and population expansion, which has culminated in the unsustainable exploitation of ecosystems and biodiversity, and land degradation.

In Cameroon, statistics from the Ministry of Environment Protection of Nature and Sustainable Development indicating that almost 12 million hectares of land in Cameroon are degraded, with about 8 million hectares of it in the northern regions. The North West and West regions of the country are also amongst the most affected regions. The end results of this have been a drastic decline in net revenue from agriculture, compounded by an ever decreasing and unpredictable and increasing temperature.

To avert this plight, the Cameroon Minister of Environment, Protection of Nature and Sustainable Development, Hele Pierre, has called on Cameroonians to reduce individual impacts on the environment by changing their consumption attitudes.  Meanwhile, environmental pundits hold that if every consumer were to buy products that do not degrade the land, suppliers would cut back the flow of these products and send a powerful signal to producers and policymakers.