The Desertification COP no longer wants to be isolated from its climate and biodiversity sisters, all three created thirty years ago, in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio. After Cali and Baku, it is in Riyadh that the 16th Conference of the Parties dedicated to land degradation opens. This time, fewer than 5,000 people are expected for a much less publicized meeting, yet at the confluence of the other two. Here's what you need to know.
- Desertification: three main causes…
The abstruse name of this COP is a problem in itself because it masks the reality: the widespread degradation of the world's land, which affects 1.2 billion people, mainly in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid environments. “ It is a progressive process of loss of soil productivity and thinning of vegetation cover due to human activities and climatic variations such as prolonged droughts and floods. What is alarming is that while the land's topsoil can be washed away by wind and water within a few seasons if mistreated, it takes centuries for it to replenish itself. », explains the UN Framework Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which governs the COP of the same name.
Without becoming deserts, an extreme form of degradation, the UN estimates the number of so-called degraded lands at 40%. Not that they are no longer useful, or used, but that they have been transformed and no longer provide natural ecosystem services – starting with the capture of carbon emitted into the atmosphere.
The first factor is land use change. Here again, this jargon more concretely refers to deforestation and urbanization, generally for the benefit of intensive agriculture, monoculture or livestock breeding. Fewer forests, tropical forests in particular, mean more warming and more drying of the soil, which is even more weakened in the long term with the use of synthetic products, designed in the 20th century to increase productivity. Geographer Blanca Prado works specifically on land degradation in Mexico. At the microphone of Raphael Moranfrom the Spanish editorial staff of RFI, she estimates that 60% of the country's soils are degraded and she identified two main factors: “ Poor agricultural practices and excess grazing are the main causes. In Mexico, for agriculture, the abundant use of fertilizers and pesticides has long been promoted. This caused the destruction of the soil. During fieldwork in the Chiapas region, for example, farmers told us that to prepare the land, they used a product that “killed everything” against weeds. These bad practices have led to reductions in yields in several regions of Mexico. »
Forests become towns or amusement parks, swamps become industrial zones or airports, meadows are transformed into fields of monoculture or solar panels… Often underpinned by good intentions (feeding the world, housing populations, etc.), the artificialization of land retroactively generates increasingly visible harmful consequences. If the human toll from the historic floods in Spain on October 29, 2024, was so heavy a month ago, it is largely because of the concrete work which made it possible to dump the equivalent of 5400 Olympic swimming pools in a few hours in the streets.
► To understand degradation, our article on the “special report on land” unveiled on the occasion of COP16
The other cause of this soil degradation is droughts, which are more severe and more frequent due to climate change. “ By 2050, 3 out of 4 people will be affected by drought. Rich or poor, no country is immune », insisted Ibrahim Thiaw, secretary general of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, during a press conference. Totaling 75% of arid lands, the African continent is the most exposed to the problem of drying out soils, which harden and prevent water from infiltrating, and the encroachment of the desert.
However, repeated climatic disasters show that southern Europe – but also agricultural regions in the United States or South-East Asia – are no longer spared at all from the phenomenon. Witness the repeated fires around it, the lack of water in more and more localities. 1.5 billion hectares of land will need to be restored by 2030 to achieve a land degradation neutral world.
- … a myriad of consequences
The decline in fertile soils primarily impacts global food supply. “ We talk about land and drought, but it's actually about food and food security, insists Ibrahim Thiaw. By 2050, we will need twice as much food as today, but 40% of our land is already degraded… We are losing our land, we are losing productivity. » If access to food for all is progressing in South America, according to the latest FAO report, Africa is still suffering more. 2.8 billion people could not afford a healthy diet in 2022. The problem does not come from production, which is sufficient, but from distribution and waste. But it will not be resolved if, on top of that, the soils are degraded by the effects of climate and artificialization.
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Drought also has consequences for energy security. Dried up, hydroelectric dams no longer function properly in certain regions of the world. Drought also affects nuclear energy since power plants need water to be cooled.
International maritime trade may also be hampered. The two great canals, Suez and Panamawere paralyzed, the first by a storm of dust and sand making navigation impossible; the second by its drying up.
Soil degradation leads to the disappearance of fertile land and water resources. This degradation is a now sadly documented source of conflicts and forced emigration, from the Sahel to Afghanistan.
Finally, the disappearance of natural spaces causes the extinction or departure of the species that lived there, aggravates the erosion of biodiversity in general – one of the nine planetary limits that must not be crossed – leading to zoonotic diseases of animal origin. The WHO estimates that 75% of new infectious diseases are zoonotic.
- What to expect from COP16?
Highly codified like the other COPs, the Desertification COP is a UN diplomatic arena in which 197 State Parties (including the European Union) participate every two years. The previous one took place in Abidjan, Ivory Coast.
No more than 5,000 participants (technical negotiators, ministers, observer NGOs or not) are expected in Riyadh, far from the 65,000 registered in Baku in mid-November and the 12,000 just before in Colombia.
A scientific moment. Drought will be the key subject, around which its corollary of access to fresh water will revolve, poor irrigation practices constituting another factor in soil and subsoil degradation.
These fifteen days of diplomatic discussions will be supported by the publication of several reports on this subject. The first, ” pulling back from the precipice: transforming land management to stay within the limits of the planet », unveiled this Sunday, summarizes scientific knowledge on land degradation. It will be followed this Monday by a first global drought atlas.
A drought resilience observatory must also be created. There is a lot of information [sur la sécheresse] produced by several centers around the world, but we need to better understand the resilience part to know if the investments that we are going to promote will have the expected effects », indicated Andrea Meza Murillo, assistant to the executive secretary of the Framework Convention.
Finally, the Science-Policy Interface, the scientific body which aims to advise political decision-makers and whose mandate is coming to an end, will be the subject of debate. Created in 2013, ten years after its counterparts in the IPCC for climate and IPBES for biodiversity, it brings together researchers within the Convention, and not independently of it.
A financial moment. As in other environmental negotiations, the question of the means allocated to land restoration will be central. This involves both financing the actions and the functioning of the COP itself. The Convention “ requires a much higher operating budget than in the past because there are more missions, there are more issues. This will also be an object of negotiation », points out Patrice Burger, from the NGO Cari, a fine connoisseur of these negotiations, at the microphone ofIgor Strauss.
On Tuesday, a “Financial Needs Assessment” will be unveiled. We already know the estimated amount to restore 1.5 billion ha of land in five years: nearly a billion dollars per day, or 2,300 billion by 2030. This seems ambitious given the results obtained during the COP Climate in Baku. “ We based ourselves on the ambitions declared by each country in their national plans », Specified Louise Baker, an executive at the Convention. 120 countries have announced their plans to combat desertification. They are waiting for resources. Saudi Arabia, a country three-quarters of which is desert, is hosting a UN conference for the first time. It must launch its Global Partnership for Drought Resilience, involving the announcement of subsidies intended for the 80 most vulnerable countries.
A political moment. In negotiations, countries negotiate in groups. On the one hand, four “Appendices”: Africa, Asia, Latin America, Mediterranean countries, which declare themselves affected by land degradation. They would like the establishment of a binding protocol, such as Kyoto. Facing them, the West European and Others Group, Weog, which brings together nations that say they are “unaffected” (France, United States, etc.) by desertification. A scientifically questionable position which allows these States to exempt themselves from developing strategies to combat degradation and even from applying the decisions taken during the COPs.
Two visions of agri-food systems should confront each other during this COP: one conventional and largely subsidized, applied massively everywhere on the planet since the middle of the 20th century, based on the intensification of crops and livestock breeding great reinforcement of synthetic products and the extension of agricultural operations; the other, agro-ecological, used throughout the world but in a more fragmented and localized manner, often due to a lack of political and financial support. Several hundred NGOs and scientific research centers will be present to advocate for this model which, without opposing the use of new technologies, turns its back on chemicals.
The number two of the UNCCD Andrea Meza Murillo “ hopes from this COP a decision which marks a landmark » pour « the establishment of an international framework on the problems caused by drought. With this decision, countries will have more capacity to implement at the national level. This is a first step. » In other words, a founding text equivalent to that of the Paris Climate Agreement (2015) or the Kunming-Montreal Agreement (2022). An objective that seems chimerical given the marginalization of the “COP of the poor”.
