As the Earth warms, the ground becomes drier and saltier, severely impacting the planet’s 8 billion inhabitants. Nearly a third of its residents already live in places where water is increasingly scarce and it is increasingly difficult to grow crops and livestock.
Climate change is accelerating this trend. Global warming has caused 77 percent of the Earth’s land to dry out over the past 30 years, and the proportion of overly saline soils has rapidly increased, a new study has found.
Drylands, or dry areas where access to water is difficult, now cover more than 40 percent of the Earth (excluding Antarctica), and this may be a permanent effect of climate change. According to a landmark report It is established by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Another new analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) finds that approx. 10% of the world’s soil An additional 2.5 billion acres are at risk due to excess salt.
These intertwined trends are worsening food and water security while threatening agricultural productivity, biodiversity and ecosystem health. Together, the two reports sound an urgent warning that unless the world curbs emissions, these changes will continue and have serious consequences.
“Without a concerted effort, billions of people will face a future of hunger, displacement and economic decline.” said Nicole Berger is a dryland ecologist at UNCCD.
Approximately 7.6 percent of the Earth’s land area was reshaped by climate change between 1990 and 2020, with most of the affected areas changing from humid to dry terrain (where 90 percent of rainfall falls before reaching the ground). (defined as an area of evaporation). Together, they span a geographical area larger than Canada and were home to about 30 percent of the world’s population in 2020, researchers say. This is an increase of more than 7% in recent decades. That rate could more than double by the end of the century unless the world drastically limits emissions. By that point, more than two-thirds of the world’s landmass, excluding Greenland and Antarctica, is expected to have reduced water storage.
These changes are not limited to regions already considered arid or expected to become deserts. When modeling global high-emissions scenarios, researchers found that similar changes could occur in the Midwest, central Mexico, and the Mediterranean, to name three examples. Researchers do not expect this trend to reverse.
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Hannah Waterhouse, a soil and water scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, feels that this expansion is occurring under conditions that are not as strong as future temperatures. That is to say. This suggests the problem is only going to escalate, she said, leading to problems such as widespread conflict as food and water become increasingly scarce.
“We can look to geopolitical and ecological events that are happening now to understand what to expect in the future,” Waterhouse said. “Think about what is happening now in Sudan, where climate change is exacerbating resource scarcity, which interacts with governance and geopolitics to produce violent outcomes for civilians.”
Do not confuse dryness with drought. Droughts are often described as a sudden, surprising, but temporary lack of water, and are often caused by low precipitation, high temperatures, low humidity, and unusual wind patterns. On the other hand, in arid regions, climatic conditions continue for long periods in which evaporation exceeds rainfall, creating conditions that make it difficult to sustain life. This is much more subtle than drought, but just as significant.
“The drought will end,” said UNCCD Executive Director Ibrahim Thiau. stated in a statement. “However, when a region’s climate becomes drier, it loses its ability to return to its previous state. The arid climate, which currently affects large tracts of land around the world, is irreversible and this change is We are redefining life above.”
Dryland expansion is widely considered to be the biggest cause of the deterioration of Earth’s agricultural systems and the difficulty of producing enough food. This situation has also been associated with a loss of gross domestic product, large-scale immigration, and increased adverse health outcomes and mortality. These intensify wildfires, dust storms, and dust storms, and degrade ecosystems. It also promotes water and soil erosion and salinization.
Climate change is already disrupting food production, with one in 11 people going hungry around the world last year, and research suggests the problem will worsen in many regions, particularly in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. suggests. Under business-as-usual emissions scenarios, sub-Saharan Africa could lose up to 22 percent of its current crop production capacity by 2050. Soybean, wheat, and rice prices could also plummet around the world.
Maria Konyushkova, a soil scientist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and lead author of a report released by the UN agency on December 11, said the rapid expansion of the world’s drylands is due to a simultaneous increase in salinity. “It’s 100 percent correlated” with the increase in high soils, he said. The larger the area, the less fresh water is available. As a result, farmers have to rely on brackish water, which increases soil salinity.
Soluble salts are a component of all soils, but too much of them impairs plant water absorption, effectively drawing water away from plants and inhibiting plant growth. High salinity also changes the soil structure, making it more susceptible to erosion. All of this reduces soil fertility, which could reduce yields of crops such as rice and beans by as much as 70% in the most affected countries, researchers found. Approximately 10 percent of the world’s irrigated farmland and a similar proportion of rain-fed farmland are already affected by this dire trend.
Currently, 10 countries, including China, Russia, and the United States, account for 70 percent of the earth’s saline soils. This costs the global agricultural sector at least $27 billion each year. If the world continues to warm at this rate, past research estimates that more than 50 percent of the world’s agricultural land will be similarly affected by 2050, exacerbating yield declines that are already causing rising hunger rates.
Where to go from here was a central topic at UNCCD COP16 earlier this month, when representatives from around 200 countries gathered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to discuss land degradation, desertification and drought. UN Secretary-General António Guterres: “We depend on land to survive” said at a press conference. “Yet we treat it like dirt.”
Nature-based solutions such as agroecology, along with improved crop and water management, technological solutions, and the development of water-efficient and salt-tolerant crop varieties, are coupled with locally deployed mitigation measures. It has been suggested that this is one of the adaptation measures.
Big investments are also being touted as a solution. Previous UNCCD report They suggest that halting the rate of Earth’s land degradation could cost the global economy $23 trillion by 2050, which would cost around $4.6 trillion. I discovered it. The agency told negotiators at the summit: At least $2.6 trillion Required for repair and resilience purposes by 2030.
By the end of the summit, just over $12 billion had been pledged to tackle the issue across 80 fragile states, but negotiators left after failing to agree on a legally binding protocol of action. .
Waterhouse has doubts about some of the proposals highlighted in the study, which she considers “top-down technocratic solutions.” One example is the Great Wall of China, a multibillion-dollar initiative to plant trees to prevent desertification in Africa’s Sahel region. This initiative, launched in 2007, attracted criticism This is because it exacerbates water scarcity and biodiversity loss.
Konyushkova believes the two reports are an urgent call for governments around the world to prioritize investment in resilience to manage what is clearly becoming a crisis. “All trends indicate that freshwater resources will be depleted…but we have many approaches to adapt,” she said. “We have to start now because it’s already here. It’s already here and it’s getting worse, even if governments don’t necessarily understand it.”
