"Restore the land, restore hope". The slogan chosen for the seventeenth United Nations World Conference on Desertification (Cop17) aims to underscore the fact that a great deal of our lives and our wealth depends on the soil. For this reason, protecting it is essential to guarantee wellbeing for future generations.

"Land is our most vital infrastructure"

Taking part in the conference – which began on Monday 17 August in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, and will run until Friday the 28th – are 197 nations from around the world, along with representatives of civil society, the scientific community and international organisations. The objective is to reverse a trend that links desertification, loss of biodiversity and climate change: phenomena that are closely interdependent.

"Land is our most vital infrastructure, as it guarantees food security, access to water, livelihoods and economic stability," stressed Yasmine Fouad, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (Unccd). When soils degrade, therefore, resources are inevitably lost, competition for the remaining ones intensifies, losses are incurred and dynamics of mass migration are set in motion.

75 per cent of global soil is already degraded

"With Cop17 in Mongolia," Fouad added, "we want to send a strong message. 'Restore the land, restore hope' is not merely an environmental issue, but a priority in terms of development and resilience. In the face of intensifying drought and accelerating soil degradation, the conference has the task of promoting concrete and achievable solutions."

The problem of desertification is, moreover, a growing one, fuelled by rising average global temperatures, pollution and land consumption. In common parlance, when we talk about desertification, we tend to picture the sand dunes typical of the Sahara: in reality, the official definition refers to the "degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas, attributable to various causes, including climate change and human activities".

According to the Global Land Outlook, published in 2018 by the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, more than 75 per cent of global soil is already degraded to some degree. A figure that is already extremely high, and which could reach 90 per cent by 2050. Every year, moreover, 4.18 million square kilometres are degraded across the world: roughly half the surface area of the European Union, primarily in Asia and Africa.

Protecting land means securing resources and political and economic stability

This results in a decline in agricultural productivity, which threatens food security as well as political and economic stability, particularly in the most vulnerable regions. For this reason, governments around the world need to raise their awareness of the issue. The Unccd, a body established in 1992 following the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has the task of finding technical as well as financial solutions to reverse the trend.

"Cop17 must not fall into the repetition of old commitments, but must accelerate in making them concrete, transforming them into measurable results," urged Mongolia's Prime Minister Uchral Nyam-Osor. The hope is that the global consensus will be strong enough to achieve this goal.