Land degradation will unleash a mass migration of at least 50 million people by 2050 — as many as 700 million — unless humans stop depleting the life-giving resources, scientists warned yesterday in the first-ever analysis of the health of land around the globe and its ability to human beings.
The Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment Report, which was compiled at the request of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, was released in Medellin, Colombia, after it was approved by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
It took more than 100 volunteer scientists from around the globe three years to compile, analyzing all the available scientific data.
Already, land decay caused by unsustainable farming, mining, pollution, and city expansion is undermining the well-being of about 3.2 billion people — 40 percent of the global population, they said.
The condition of land is “critical,” IPBES said.
“We’ve converted large amounts of our forests, we’ve converted large amounts of our grasslands, we’ve lost 87 percent of our wetlands ... we’ve really changed our land surface in the last several hundred years,” IPBES chairman Robert Watson said of the findings.
“The message is: land degradation, loss of productivity of those soils and those vegetations will force people to move. It will be no longer viable to live on those lands,” he said.
“Between now and 2050, we estimate the number could be 50 [million] to some 700 million people,” he said, adding that the lowest number was a best-case-scenario projection.
It assumes “we’re actually starting to be much more sustainable, we’ve really tried hard to have sustainable agricultural practices, sustainable forestry, we’ve tried to minimize climate change,” he said.
The upper end of the range is based on a “business-as-usual” approach, he added.
The main drivers of land degradation were “high-consumption lifestyles” in rich countries, and rising demand for products in developing ones, fueled by income and population growth, the report said.
The problem of land decay does not only impact the people who live on it, but threatens food security for all Earth’s citizens, as well as access to clean water and breathable air regulated by the soil and the plants that grow on it, the report said.
The analysis estimated that land degradation cost the equivalent of 10 percent of global economic output in 2010.
In 30 years from now, an estimated 4 billion people — about 40 percent of the projected population by then — will live in “dryland” areas, arid and semi-arid places with low agriculture productivity, the report said, compared with just over 3 billion today.
“Implementing the right actions to combat land degradation can transform the lives of millions of people across the planet, but this will become more difficult and more costly the longer we take to act,” Watson said.
The land degredation report follows four reports the IPBES released on Friday the state of plant and animal species, which concluded that biodiversity was in decline in all regions.
Of concern to nations in Asia and the Pacific was that if current fishing practices continue, there will be no exploitable fish stocks in the region by 2048.
US President Donald Trump yesterday announced sweeping "reciprocal tariffs" on US trading partners, including a 32 percent tax on goods from Taiwan that is set to take effect on Wednesday. At a Rose Garden event, Trump declared a 10 percent baseline tax on imports from all countries, with the White House saying it would take effect on Saturday. Countries with larger trade surpluses with the US would face higher duties beginning on Wednesday, including Taiwan (32 percent), China (34 percent), Japan (24 percent), South Korea (25 percent), Vietnam (46 percent) and Thailand (36 percent). Canada and Mexico, the two largest US trading
AIR SUPPORT: The Ministry of National Defense thanked the US for the delivery, adding that it was an indicator of the White House’s commitment to the Taiwan Relations Act Deputy Minister of National Defense Po Horng-huei (柏鴻輝) and Representative to the US Alexander Yui on Friday attended a delivery ceremony for the first of Taiwan’s long-awaited 66 F-16C/D Block 70 jets at a Lockheed Martin Corp factory in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are so proud to be the global home of the F-16 and to support Taiwan’s air defense capabilities,” US Representative William Timmons wrote on X, alongside a photograph of Taiwanese and US officials at the event. The F-16C/D Block 70 jets Taiwan ordered have the same capabilities as aircraft that had been upgraded to F-16Vs. The batch of Lockheed Martin
China's military today said it began joint army, navy and rocket force exercises around Taiwan to "serve as a stern warning and powerful deterrent against Taiwanese independence," calling President William Lai (賴清德) a "parasite." The exercises come after Lai called Beijing a "foreign hostile force" last month. More than 10 Chinese military ships approached close to Taiwan's 24 nautical mile (44.4km) contiguous zone this morning and Taiwan sent its own warships to respond, two senior Taiwanese officials said. Taiwan has not yet detected any live fire by the Chinese military so far, one of the officials said. The drills took place after US Secretary
THUGGISH BEHAVIOR: Encouraging people to report independence supporters is another intimidation tactic that threatens cross-strait peace, the state department said China setting up an online system for reporting “Taiwanese independence” advocates is an “irresponsible and reprehensible” act, a US government spokesperson said on Friday. “China’s call for private individuals to report on alleged ‘persecution or suppression’ by supposed ‘Taiwan independence henchmen and accomplices’ is irresponsible and reprehensible,” an unnamed US Department of State spokesperson told the Central News Agency in an e-mail. The move is part of Beijing’s “intimidation campaign” against Taiwan and its supporters, and is “threatening free speech around the world, destabilizing the Indo-Pacific region, and deliberately eroding the cross-strait status quo,” the spokesperson said. The Chinese Communist Party’s “threats