Every year, due to desertification, land degradation and drought, 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil are lost across the world, with serious repercussions for the lives of millions of people. This is the alarm raised by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres on the occasion of World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, observed on 17 June. Soil is one of the most complex ecosystems in nature; it is home to a quarter of our planet's biodiversity, and the organisms that inhabit it provide us with indispensable ecosystem services, such as carbon sequestration and water purification. It is therefore necessary to "restore and protect the fragile layer of land that covers only one third of the Earth, but which can alleviate or accelerate the crisis facing the climate and biodiversity," António Guterres stated.

Let's grow the future together

The aim of the world day is to bring the problem of desertification to the fore, to step up efforts to counter the effects of drought, and to promote the implementation of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (Unccd). The 2019 edition of the day, whose slogan is Let's grow the future together, is dedicated to three key land-related issues: drought, human security and climate.

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Why we must save the soil

Restoring degraded land can be an important weapon in the fight against climate change. Land-use practices, particularly agriculture, are responsible for nearly 25 per cent of total global emissions; if restored, degraded lands could be capable of storing up to three million tonnes of carbon per year. Protecting soil would also have numerous positive knock-on effects. "If we act to restore degraded land we could save 1.3 billion dollars a day to invest in education and clean energy, and we would be able to reduce poverty, conflict and environmental migration," said Ibrahim Thiaw, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

How to fight desertification

The mismanagement of land, Thiaw reported, has over the years caused the degradation of an area twice the size of China. Some nations have, however, begun to reverse this trend and to embark on ambitious projects to combat desertification.

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Technology against the advancing desert

Since time immemorial, the inhabitants of Dunhuang, a city in Jiuquan prefecture, have lived alongside sandstorms and the encroachment of the Taklamakan and Gobi deserts, to such an extent that the ancient Book of Han describes "a strong wind blowing from the north-west, turning the clouds yellow." China began fighting desertification in 1978, when the government planted numerous trees to create a kind of green buffer between the deserts and the cities of the north. In Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of northern China characterised by many large deserts, more than 1.7 billion trees have been planted across roughly 400,000 hectares of land since 1981. In 2018, the Asian country also launched a massive reforestation plan aiming to increase tree cover by 23 per cent by 2020.

A further boost to reforestation — an extraordinary tool for combating desertification and soil erosion — has come from technology. The company Ant Financial Services launched the app Ant Forest, which is able to assess users' environmental impact. The application rewards virtuous behaviours, such as using public transport, with virtual "green energy" points. After accumulating a certain number of points, users can choose to redeem a "virtual tree", which is matched to a real sapling that will then be planted, at Ant Financial Services' expense, in the sands of the Gobi. Since its launch in 2016, Ant Forest has attracted around 500 million users, thanks to whom one hundred million trees have been planted in China's most arid regions.

Belarus restores its peatlands

Peatlands are veritable CO2 traps, capable of storing vast quantities of carbon. Unfortunately, these precious ecosystems are threatened worldwide by human activities; over the past century and a half, no other natural environment has been destroyed — dismissed as worthless — to the same extent as peatlands and marshes. Today, however, their extraordinary importance in addressing the climate crisis has been understood, and some nations are trying to remedy the mistakes of the past. In Belarus, peatlands cover approximately 2.5 million hectares, but only 900,000 retain their natural state. In 1986, the Mahilyow region in eastern Belarus was severely affected by the Chernobyl disaster and still faces serious ecological problems today: peatlands that have been drained and over-exploited carry a high risk of fires that can generate radioactive smoke.

To reduce this risk, in 2018 Belarus, in collaboration with the Unccd and a regional water engineering company, launched a pilot project to restore the peatlands. To do so, a number of dams were built on old drainage channels to prevent water loss from the marsh into the adjacent river. Since then, the water level has risen by approximately two metres, although it will take hundreds of years to restore the ancient peat levels. Belarus, thanks to growing awareness of the multiple benefits that wetlands provide — such as microclimate regulation and biodiversity conservation — has decided to invest in restoring these degraded areas, creating new legislation centred on the protection and sustainable use of peatlands. The goal is to restore at least 60,000 hectares of peatlands by 2030, and this effort is expected to enable Belarus to reduce its CO2 emissions by approximately three million tonnes.

The African Great Green Wall

The Great Green Wall is a visionary undertaking, a symbol of hope against the grave threat of desertification. The initiative, led by the African Union, was launched in 2007 and aims to restore a vast degraded area of Africa, helping to improve the lives of millions of people living in some of the poorest areas of the world. The project plans to create a true wall of forest stretching for almost 8,000 kilometres, crossing Africa along its entire width and thus becoming the largest living structure on the planet. The project's objective is to restore one hundred million hectares of currently degraded land by 2030, sequester 250 million tonnes of carbon and create ten million jobs.

More than ten years after its launch, approximately 15 per cent of the wall has been planted, and significant progress has already been made in restoring the fertility of lands in the Sahel, a region of sub-Saharan Africa. In Ethiopia, for example, 15 million hectares of degraded land have been restored; in Senegal, more than 11 million trees have been planted; while in Nigeria, 20,000 jobs have been created.