Reuters | By: Alex Whiting | GPE – September 19, 2017:

More than 1.3 billion people live on agricultural land that is deteriorating, putting them at risk of worsening hunger, water shortages and poverty, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) said.

Originally published September 12, 2017: People’s use of the earth’s natural reserves has doubled in the last 30 years. Now a third of the planet’s land is severely degraded, and every year 15 billion trees and 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil are lost, UNCCD said.

“The land we live on is being strained to breaking point. Restoration and conservation are key to its survival,” UNCCD said in a report launched in Ordos, China.

UNCCD promotes good land stewardship, and is the only legally binding international agreement on land issues.

As land becomes less productive – which can happen through deforestation, overgrazing, flash floods and drought – people are forced to migrate to cities or abroad, there is greater likelihood of conflict over dwindling resources, and countries’ economies are hit, said UNCCD deputy executive secretary Pradeep Monga.

“If you don’t fix land degradation, we get into a cycle where people are losing their livelihoods, their homes, their fields,” he said.

And if the amount of productive land shrinks, less will be available to feed the world’s population which is predicted to increase to more than 9 billion people by 2050, up from 7 billion today.

“If we can stop land degradation and green our deserts, we can easily become food secure,” Monga told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

To read full article – please click here.