The Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) began its second and final week of work in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Monday, December 9, with the publication of a shock study. More than three-quarters of the Earth's landmass has experienced a drier climate in the three decades leading up to 2020, compared with the previous 30 years, according to the document produced under the auspices of the UNCCD ("The Global Threat of Drying Lands"). By 2100, up to 5 billion people could be living in arid zones, more than twice as many as today.
A few days earlier, at the opening of the COP, the UNCCD and the European Commission had published an equally alarming "World Drought Atlas," pointing out how droughts threaten energy, agriculture, river transport and international trade, and can "trigger cascading effects, fueling inequalities and conflicts and threatening public health." According to the document, droughts have increased by 29% since 2000, due to climate change and the unsustainable management of land and water resources. "No country – whatever its size, GDP, or latitude – is immune," the atlas says, citing in bulk the Great Plains in the US, the city of Barcelona in Spain and the Yangtze River basin in China.
Faced with this "emergency on a planetary scale," the summit in Riyadh is an opportunity for governments to discuss financial aid to combat soil degradation (notably with Saudi Arabia's announcement of a global drought resilience partnership with an initial envelope of $2.15 billion, or €2 billion), but also for NGOs and companies to present solutions that have been successfully implemented: early warning systems, microinsurance for small-scale farmers, agroforestry and wastewater reuse.
In many cases, the key to success lies in the simultaneous mobilization of all players. "To achieve ambitious goals, we need to adopt a collective approach that includes ministries other than the environment, as well as local authorities, professional agricultural organizations and public agricultural banks," said Sandra Rullière, deputy head of rural development at the Agence Française de Développement (AFD).
This has not always been the case in the past. "On the Great Green Wall launched in 2007 in the Sahel, the initial vision was to plant trees on a strip of land stretching from Dakar to Djibouti, without necessarily involving local populations or ensuring the scientific merits of the operation. Today, this initiative is taking the form of a mosaic of sustainable land management approaches involving all stakeholders, for the benefit of better consideration of farmers' income," said Rullière, who said that the question of the place of private players is "very present" in the debates underway in Riyadh.
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