Land Degradation Control and Its Global Environmental Benefits

land degradation & development
Land Degrad. Develop. 16: 99112 (2005)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/ldr.687
LAND DEGRADATION CONTROL AND ITS GLOBAL
ENVIRONMENTAL BENEFITS
G. GISLADOTTIR
1
AND M. STOCKING
2
*
1
Department of Geology and Geography, University of Iceland, Askja, Reykjavik, Iceland
2
School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Received 18 February 2004; Revised 12 June 2004; Accepted 22 December 2004
ABSTRACT
Acknowledged by world leaders as a global problem, land degradation has been taken seriously in three ways: its extent and the
proportion of the global population affected; international environmental policy responses; and its inter-relation with other
global environmental issues such as biodiversity. Messages about land degradation have, however, suffered from abuses, which
have rendered appropriate policy responses ineffective. For control to be effective, the paper argues that the synergies between
land degradation and the two other main global environmental change components (biodiversity and climate change) should be
more fully exploited. A focus on the interlinkages, of which there are six possible permutations, is fully supported by empirical
ndings that suggest that land degradation control would not only technically be better served by addressing aspects of
biodiversity and climate change but also that international nancing mechanisms and the major donors would nd this
more acceptable. The DPSIR (Driving Force, Pressure, State, Impacts, Response) conceptual framework model is used to
illustrate how land degradation control could be more effective, tackling not only the drivers of change but also major
developmental issues such as poverty and food insecurity. Copyright #2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
key words: land degradation; global environment; UN environmental conventions; synergies; biodiversity; climate change
LAND DEGRADATION IN GLOBAL CONTEXT
Land degradation is widely recognized as a global problem associated with desertication in arid, semiarid and dry
sub-humid zones, commonly called the drylands. Yet, land degradation is a contested topic in its determinants,
degree, distribution and effects. While long associated with drylands, which cover some 47 per cent of the globes
surface (UNEP, 1997), land degradation is considered by many observers to be highly variable, discontinuous,
arising from different causes and affecting people differentially according to their economic, social and political
circumstances (e.g. Mortimore, 1998). Uncertainty as to the extent and impact of land degradation is rife. Some
sources routinely report that up to 70 per cent of all drylands are desertied; others suggest that the gure is no
more than 17 per cent (see Reynolds et al., 2003). Amidst such discrepancies, it is difcult to identify whether and
how land degradation should be an issue of global concern. The overall aim of this paper, then, is to explore how
the process of land degradation, which impacts upon people locally and differentially, can also be considered to be
of global interest with global implications.
There are three principal ways that land degradation can be perceived to be global. First, it affects a large
number of people over a signicant proportion of the earths surface. Adams and Eswaran (2000) estimate that it
Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Correspondence to: M. Stocking, School of Development Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.
E-mail: m.stocking@uea.ac.uk
Contract/grant sponsors: IGU Commission on Land Degradation; United Nations University, Tokyo; FAOGEF Land degradation assessment in
drylands project; United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi.
impacts 26 billion people in more than a hundred countries, covering over 33 per cent of the earths land surface.
Around 73 per cent of rangelands in drylands are currently being degraded, together with 47 per cent of marginal
rainfed croplands and a signicant percentage of irrigated croplands. The science behind the actual extent of land
degradation is open to debate, especially in dryland parts of Africa (Stocking, 1996). However, even restrained
estimates show that it affects the poor and most marginal rural people world-wide disproportionately. Taking only
the worlds drylands, 37 per cent of the worlds total population live on land that is either potentially or actually
degraded. Asia, Africa and South America have the largest populations living in drylands, both in terms of
numbers and percent: 14 billion, 268 million and 87 million people, or 42, 41 and 30 per cent of each regions
population respectively. The drylands are the home of the worlds poorest and most marginalized people,
economically and geographically. The number of poor rural people living in drylands is estimated to be close to
one billion (Dobie, 2001).
Second, land degradation has prompted a stream of national and international policy responses. The Dust Bowl
era of the 1930s United States prompted the rst national research programme on soil erosion and its impact
(Trimble, 1985). Other countries and regions soon emulated this lead: e.g. Brazil (Lal, 1977); Sri Lanka (Joachim
and Pandithasekera, 1930); and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi
(Jackson, 1960). With major increases in funding for erosion research and surveys of soil degradation, a number of
international projects were initiated: e.g. the Provisional Methodology for Soil Degradation Assessment (FAO,
1979). Other initiatives included the United Nations Conference on Desertication (UNCOD) in 1977 and the
United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992. The latter led to the adoption of
the Convention to Combat Desertication (UNCCD) in 1994. Land degradation was reafrmed at the World
Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in September 2002 as one of the major global environmental and
sustainable development challenges of the 21st century. The Summit (WSSD, 2002) called on the Global
Environmental Facility (GEF) to designate land degradation as a new focal area to support the implementation
of the UNCCD. This proposal was embodied in the Beijing Declaration of the Second GEF Assembly in October
2002. As a follow up, the GEF launched a new Operational Program on Sustainable Land Management in July 2003
to support the designation of land degradation as a focal area. Along with the new global policy came an immediate
US$250 million of nancing for the incremental coststhat is, additional costs to meet global benetsof land
degradation control in developing countries. At the time of writing this paper that allocation had been fully
committed and the GEF donors are under pressure to increase their contributions in the next phase of GEF.
Third, land degradation negatively affects a number of important problems of global concern. Pagiola (1999)
denes land degradations effects on global problems as direct, on the degradation processes themselves, and
indirect, resulting from land users responses to land degradation problems. In the rst category are effects on
climate change and loss of biodiversity. Direct effects through biophysical processes include carbon reduction in
soils and loss of below-ground biodiversity. In the second category, involving arguably the greater impact on
human society, are the reductions of productivity caused by climate change, desertication and loss of biodiversity.
On rangelands, for example, Pagiola (1999) lists the disruption of migratory patterns of wild animals, the
introduction and propagation of diseases, competition for available food and water, and changes in forage species
composition. There are also effects on international waters, such as off-site pollution and sedimentation. These
synergies between land degradation, biodiversity and climate change have major implications for all the global
environmental conventions. Global developmental initiatives are also involved, such as two of the most directly
relevant Millennium Development Goals: No. 1 the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, which is associated
with declining status of natural resources, and No. 7 environmental sustainability, which is seen as a social
responsibility (see The World Bank Group, 2004). World leaders and the major multilateral development and
environment institutions all subscribe to the importance of land degradation, development, food security and
poverty linkages (see Table I).
There are, therefore, compelling reasons to see land degradation in global context. This paper addresses the
developments and lessons in measures to control land degradation, and identies the linkages between actions at
the local level and the consequent global environmental benets. The objective is to justify that measures to
control land degradation yield global benets that are worth nancing through international programmes such as
100 G. GISLADOTTIR AND M. STOCKING
Copyright # 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. LAND DEGRADATION & DEVELOPMENT, 16: 99112 (2005)
the GEF. However, there are good ways and bad ways to promote land degradation control, and these need
routinely to be re-examined in the light of the global environmental context. This paper therefore starts with a
selective review of some of the lessons learned. This also sets the scene for further papers in this volume that
examine how land degradation is being identied and mitigated in a range countries varying from Iceland to South
Africa
LESSONS LEARNED IN LAND DEGRADATION CONTROL
A principal theme of this paper is that land degradation control, whether promoted as soil conservation or
reforestation or some other process, has been an international concern for well over 70 years. Yet there has been a
tendency to see land degradation control as a purely technical exercise and self-evidently worthwhile for human
society to pursue. Land degradation has been tackled by addressing the degradation itself, rather than its causes
and symptoms. As this paper will argue, a large measure of the problems in nancing and gaining active attention
for land degradation control arises from a somewhat myopic and technocentric view of how to reverse such
processes as soil erosion and deforestation. Simplistic messages have pervaded the subject, while actions to control
land degradation have often been based on subjective choice of information. This section reviews three areas
land degradation data, ascribing cause, and use of informationwhere major lessons have been learned. From
these, messages to inform current global efforts on land degradation control may be derived.
Health Warnings Over the Data
Especially at global and regional levels, alarming statistics are regularly used to command attention with respect to
the seriousness of land degradation. Often these are linked to what are determined to be the principal causes ( or
root causes) and expressed in terms of hectares of land ruined. Table II gives a typical example, by no means at
the most extreme end of the range of estimates, which identies great swathes of grazing, forest and agricultural
land as degraded. What is rarely given are health warnings as to the accuracy of the data, inherent problems in the
techniques used to gather the information, and the assumptions made to extend the results to give a global picture.
Table I. Statements by world leaders and multilateral institutions on land degradation linkages with global development
concerns
Statement Source
[We need to] address the causes of desertication in World Summit on Sustainable Development, September 2002
order to restore land and to address poverty resulting
from land degradation
Poor people care a lot about their environment UNDP 2003: Human Development Report
Addressing land degradation [will] . . . contribute Operational Program 15, Global Environment Facility,
signicantly to the Millennium Development Goals of December 2003
reducing by half the proportion of people in poverty
by 2015 and ensuring environmental sustainability
Land degradation is equally cause and effect of poverty Klaus Topfer, Executive Director, UNEP
and it bears long-term environmental externalities . . . to (Foreword in UNEP 2004)
which people in marginal lands are especially vulnerable
Desertication . . . contributes to food insecurity, famine Ko Anna, UN Secretary-General, 17 June 2004
and poverty, and can give rise to social, economic and
political tensions that can cause conicts, further poverty
and land degradation
Poverty and desertication are closely linked. Two-thirds Secretariat, UN Convention to Combat Desertication,
of the worlds hungry people live in rural areas 1 June 2004
of developing countries
Source: DFID, 2004.
LAND DEGRADATION CONTROL: GLOBAL BENEFITS 101
Typical amongst the health warnings should be the use of conjecture as a substitute for evidence-based science.
There has been debate as to the seriousness of global estimates of soil erosion over the last two decades. In a
landmark publication from a leading environmental policy think-tank institution in the United States, the
Worldwatch Institute, Brown and Wolf (1984) estimated global erosion to be 26 billion tonnes per year over and
above rates that might be considered allowable and which would not threaten agricultural production. This is a
huge mass of soil, which, if true, would remodel whole landscapes within historical record. A critique by Pierre
Crosson revealed the imsy basis of the science behind the estimate, an assertion by an eminent forest ecologist
as to what might happen if tropical deforestation were to occur (Crosson, 1995), and the extension of this
conjecture to global proportions. As Dregne (1992) put it: little data and much informed opinion (see also
Crosson, 2003).
The commonest problem is to take data of soil loss and runoff from small plots and to extrapolate the measured
rates (in amounts of soil per unit area) to whole catchments, districts, countries and, even, sub-continents. Yet, it
has long been known that estimates of soil loss derived from small plots do not match levels of river sedimentation,
and the smaller the plot and the bigger the river basin, the greater is the discrepancy (Walling, 1988). The lesson is
that many measures of land degradation are scale-dependent. That means that the absolute rates to indicate its
seriousness depend upon the area over which the measurements are taken. The smaller the area, the higher are the
rates. This has led to selective use of statisticssee controlling the hyperbole below. Where does the lost soil
go? It is redistributed within catchments, often to productive benet of downstream users.
The message for land degradation control in global context is that all data on rates of land degradation need to be
treated circumspectly. Land degradation assessment needs itself to be reassessed in terms of its utility,
components, presentation, attention to scale, and the use to which the information is put. Only very lately has
the global environmental community recognized this critical need (FAO, 2003) and instituted a new project Land
Degradation Assessment in Drylands funded by the Global Environment Facility with the specic task of
examining assessment for the worlds drylands at a number of scales and with a variety of techniques.
Controlling the Hyperbole
Closely related to problems of data are the use to which the data are put and how selection is made from an array of
sometimes conicting information as to the seriousness of degradation. It is natural to choose the data that make
the fundamental point that land degradation is serious. However, this will then exaggerate the extent of
the problem, creating scepticism amongst hearers, especially if such hyperbole has been used before and the
dire predictions have failed to materialise.
Hyperbole, the literary device to express strong feeling, is sometimes used in the form of metaphors in natural
science and post-modernist social science (Ley, 2003). It is legitimized on the grounds that it enables attention to
be drawn to high-prole but controversial topics believed to be important by the scientist (e.g. in entomology:
Hunter, 2000). Unfortunately, the understanding that hyperbole is not meant to be taken literally gets lost. Along
Table II. Extent and immediate causes of land degradation
Degradation extent Immediate cause
(million ha)
680 Overgrazingabout 20 per cent of the worlds pastures and rangeland have been damaged, especially
recently in Africa and Asia
580 Deforestationlarge-scale logging; clearance for farm and urban use. More than 220 million ha
of tropical forests were destroyed 197590
550 Agricultural damagewater erosion causes soil losses estimated at 25 000 million tonnes annually.
Soil salinization and waterlogging affect about 40 million ha of land globally
137 Fuelwoodabout 1730 million m
3
of fuelwood are harvested annually from forests and plantations
19.5 Industry and urbanizationurban growth, road construction, mining and industry. Mainly
a loss of agricultural land
Sources: FAO, 1996; UNEP, 2002.
with identifying the guilty, the debate on the challenges of land degradation has been beset by exaggeration,
selective use of statistics and alarmist propaganda. Reij et al. (1996) have reviewed some of the facts and the
ctions of soil loss data to explain the justications for external interventions of soil and water conservation
technologies. Alarm calls about the damaging environmental consequences have had an especially long history in
Africa (Pretty and Shah, 1994). Figures are routinely extrapolated, often by scientists, to give a global overview of
soil loss: e.g. each year, 75 billion metric tons of soil are removed from the land (Pimentel et al., 1995). They
persist even today for the continuing debate on land degradation and desertication. Take for example a recent
pronouncement by the Director-General of the major international agricultural research centre for the arid tropics,
ICARDA, based in Aleppo, Syria:
Today, about 19 billion hectares of land worldwide . . . are affected by land degradation. This year, as in
previous years, about 21 million hectares of land will become so degraded that crop productivity becomes
uneconomic and about 6 million hectares of land will be irreversibly lost for production. These gures have
serious implications for the future of humanity. The livelihoods of more than 900 million people in some 100
countries are now directly and adversely affected by land degradation (El-Beltagy, 2000).
Such views are reinforced by ofcial organizations responsible for overseeing global approaches to land
degradation, such as the Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertication (see below). The implications
are clear: land degradation is leading inexorably to calamity; the global community must take urgent action.
Identifying the Guilty
In calls to take action, attention is usually drawn to the cause of the problem so that control measures may be
appropriately targeted. As in a court of justice, if you are the cause of a problem, then you are the guilty and
will have to pay whatever penalty the court prescribes. The terms desertication and land degradation are
pejorative. They describe a process that is negative; they imply a perpetrator, the land user. Land degradation
has routinely been used and abused to identify its so-called root causes (Eskonheimo, 2003) or immediate
causes (El-Beltagy, 2000). The simplistic message is that the guilty have been identied, and there is a person
to blame. Searching for the guilty is a familiar occupation of all who seek to divert blame from themselves.
Examples might include: scientists who can project themselves as independent arbiters of the state of the
planet; decision-makers and politicians who can present themselves as merely reactive to needs; and local
professionals who struggle with the difculties of working with poor and marginal farmers. Measures to
control land degradation have, therefore, tended to focus at the most local of levels and with the practices of
land users. Land degradation control projects were primarily designed to encourage land users to adopt specic
conservation measures, selected by professionals and assumed invariably to be benecial to land users. As
Pagiola (1999, p. 23) admits, it is fair to say that this approach has failed . . . adoption of recommended
practices was low. . . seldom did adoption spread spontaneously. Even when the diagnosis of the cause of
degradation is more sophisticated, the solutions designed may have unintended outcomes. Pagiola cites the
identication of lack of nancial resources by farmers in El Salvador to implement soil conservation measures,
leading to a subsidised rural credit scheme so that investments in conservation could be made. A follow-up
study indicated that farmers were only undertaking conservation measures in order to access subsidised credit,
so making conservation a cost of obtaining credit rather than a benet of doing so. Under such conditions land
degradation control is unsustainable without continuous subsidy.
Only in the last ten to fteen years has it been acknowledged that the primary drivers of degradation may occur
at levels beyond the land user with, for example, the policies that drive land users to have to mine their soil
resources in order to survive. This understanding of the political ecology of land degradation owes much to Piers
Blaikies Chain of Explanation for Soil Erosion (Blaikie, 1989), which presents causes of erosion at levels from
the practices of the land user, right through to the nature of the state and international relations. A typical example
is a land user who is forced to farm steep slopes because his productive land is now taken by a hydro-electric power
project nanced by international donors. Who is to blame? The land user? Local and national government?
Development aid donors? There is no simple answer. The message in global context is that land degradation has
become increasingly politicized and various actors may play a game of blame (Stocking, 1995). Usually it is the
weakest local land userswho get labelled as the perpetrators. A supercial analysis of Table II is commonly
used to denigrate pastoralists, forest dwellers and peasant farmers, for example. In global context, the lesson is that
land degradation cannot just be seen as a local problem. Globallocal linkages pervade, and without attention
being paid to controlling the drivers of changeincluding those not directly related to land degradationat
multiple levels up to the global, there is no possibility that land users can or will alter their behaviour.
LAND DEGRADATION CONTROL AT GLOBAL LEVEL
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication (UNCCD) is the main global agreement to address land
degradation and the problems that it brings for poor developing countries, with an especial emphasis on Africa. Its
origins can be traced back to the 1977 United Nations Conference on Desertication, which adopted a Plan of
Action to Combat Desertication. The Plan was ineffective and largely ignored, having little backing from either
developed or developing countries, and even less from potential donors. Therefore, the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) set in train a global consultation to ensure that land degradation would be
included in the next major environmental conference along with mechanisms for nancing
Originally launched at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the UNCCD only became effective in December 1996,
once 50 signatory countries had ratied the convention. It was not only in formal ratication that UNCCD lagged,
it was also in access to funds. A Global Mechanism (GM) was established, aimed at improving management,
mobilization and coordination of funds for controlling land degradation. Developed-country parties to the
Convention were to commit themselves to providing assistance to developing-country parties to implement
National Action Plans, to provide nancing, and to mobilize new resources (Pagiola, 1999). But very little of this
support materialized and the GM limped on, with the reputation in some quarters as an ineffective lobbiest and
beggar among the environmental conventions. The UNCCD was, therefore, the laggard among the three global
environmental conventions at Rio, and remained so until at least 2002. Even since the Beijing Second GEF
Assembly in October 2002, when US$250 million was immediately pledged to support the new focal area of land
degradation in the GEF, the promised doubling of allocated funds has not materialized. Prejudice against the global
institutions tasked with land degradation runs deep among the donor countries.
An analysis of why land degradation issues should have been so retarded is beyond the scope of this paper.
However, any discussion would have to include a failure by the proposers of the convention to learn the lessons
described earlier in this paper and the high degree of politicization of the desertication debate by the main
institutions responsible for its promotion (Thomas and Middleton, 1994). Certainly, between 1992 and 2002, there
was considerable scepticism that the UNCCD was viable and committed to broad measures to combat land
degradation, rather than political advantage of members of its secretariat and a grouping of mainly African
countries seeking to use the Convention to leverage money from reluctant donors. Although that decade of
suspicion has largely passed, the UNCCD is still the poor cousin alongside the UN Framework Convention for
Climate Change (UNFCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). These last two, although not
without their problems with individual countries, have been seen as far more effective in promoting their mandate
to the international community. It is difcult to foresee the situation changing at a global level, until or unless the
case is made strongly enough that land degradation control can bring global benets. At the latest count, 191
countries have either ratied the convention or agreed to its accession, the latest being the Democratic Republic of
Korea in April 2004.
Parties to the Convention commit themselves to adopting an integrated approach to addressing the physical,
biological and socioeconomic aspects of land degradation, with countries obligating themselves to linking control
measures to poverty eradication. Reinforced at the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in
2004, land degradation control is seen formally as part of the drive to achieving global development goals of
eradicating poverty and achieving sustainable environments. For example, the United Kingdom states in its latest
report to the UNCCD (DFID, 2004, p. 4) that, the means of addressing issues surrounding desertication and land
degradation are best assimilated within the broader contexts of development plans and policies . . . combating land
desertication is challenging and requires an interdisciplinary and crosscutting approach that is long-term and
sustained. In part, that is an implied criticism of the operation of the Convention by its secretariat, and in part it is
the wish not to fund another institution tasked with bringing benets to Africa through what appears to be purely
technical solutions.
The emerging questions at global level that arise from this brief history of global interaction with land
degradation control are:
* How can land degradation control itself be rehabilitated as a topic, the funding of which will bring gains for
both the global and local environments as well for local people? This is what is given as the task for the
UNCCD, although it has singularly failed to attract a reputation for good and effective leadership within this
responsibility.
* How far can synergies be explored between those topics with clear links to global environmental change
biodiversity and climate changeand with land degradation control, which realistically in the end must rely on
local actions by local people? There are some who argue (anecdotally) that land degradation is manifestly a
global concern by itself. If not controlled it would lead not only to conicts and wars over access to land
resources, but also it would diminish the global stock of natural capital.
* How far is land degradation control a viable and useful way of proceeding with the major developmental goals,
such as food security, eradication of poverty and promotion of livelihoods and well-being? Intuitively, the
environmental and developmental goals are inseparable, but can they be grasped practically, or should attention
merely revert to measures to promote development with the expectation that environmental problems will
correct themselves?
A full exploration of these issues is beyond this paper. However, if it can be shown that land degradation is so
interlinked with other global concerns, any failure to control it would almost certainly jeopardize less controversial
issues (e.g. climate change), then a case could be made for land degradation control being a global benet and
worth pursuing. In addition, if the interlinkages are all pervasive, a case could also be made that land degradation
control should be tackled through biodiversity and climate change goals to equal or better effect than tackling it
directly.
EXPLORING THE SYNERGIES
Through the UNCCD and the GEF, it is now becoming increasingly understood that linkages exist between all
three original global environmental change components determined back in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit
biodiversity, climate change and land degradation. If one component changes, the other two are also bound to
change, usually in unison and in the same direction, positively or negatively. This is, of course, nothing new for
ecology, which is the biological science of the relations between organisms. However, this understanding is a
major step forward in justifying land degradation control as a legitimate global change topic rather than a solely
local or domestic topic. It leads the way to justifying land degradation control as an entry point or lever to
addressing practical issues of climate change control and protection of biodiversity through local measures, such
as soil conservation, restoration of land productivity and reafforestation. It leads also to a conclusion that land
degradation control might be better pursued as part of poverty alleviation and food security programmes, or of
biodiversity conservation and climate change control projects, all of which have far better resonance in the
international community and greater likelihood of funding and acceptance.
In the jargon of global environmental change, these linkages are called synergies, suggesting that the
combined global effect is greater than the sum of the individual global change effects. A focus on linkages is
therefore essential. Interlinkages and the so-called drivers of change are fundamental in understanding how
approaches to land degradation control may be designed and implemented (Berry and Olson, 2001). Again, taking
the three original global environmental change components, there are six possible permutations of synergetic
effects, all of which to one degree or another have been identied as operative. The following are recently
published examples to illustrate how synergies may occur and their degree of importance:
(1) Land degradation on climate change
Land-surface properties and the way they change in response to land degradation are the primary means whereby
climate change may occur. A study by Dirmeyer and Shukla (1996) used an atmospheric general circulation model
to investigate the climatic effect of doubling the extent of the worlds deserts. Climatic response was not uniform,
but parts of the globe especially affected include northern Africa with a far longer year-round drought. Soils
subject to land degradation tend to become lighter in colour and more erodible. The driver of change appears to be
the decrease in surface temperatures over most desertied areas because of reduced absorption of short-wave
radiation by the brighter surface. Additionally, carbon in soils is depleted, for which the links with climate change
are well established (Schlesinger, 1991).
(2) Land degradation on biodiversity
Processes of land degradation not only make soils lighter in colour because of selective removal of organic matter and
colloids, they also reduce the biological life, or soil biodiversity. Soil erosion reduces productivity (Stocking, 2003),
and productivity is closely related to biological processes dependent on both the variety and number of above-ground
and below-ground living organisms (Stocking, 1987). Further, a degraded soil is less able to support vegetation
biomass and the environmental conditions that would allow support of many sensitive and vulnerable species. So, the
loss of habitat through land degradation in, for example, the conversion of forest lands to grassland results in the local
extinction of plant and animal species (Sala et al., 2000). Conversely, sustainable land use and forestry are increasingly
being nanced as one legitimate way to enhance what is called collateral biodiversity (Koziell, 2002) or the
unplanned but deliberate increase in biodiversity through actions other than those directly related to species.
(3) Climate change on biodiversity
Climate change is predicted to have a major impact on biodiversity on a global scale (IPCC, 2001). Some
ecosystems could disappear, while others will be changed drastically, and the goods and services derived will be
severely affected. Most work on this linkage comes from marine ecosystems and the study of changes in ocean
temperatures that have occurred already. Coral reef bleaching may be a consequence of recent rises in global ocean
temperatures (Goreau et al., 2000). Elsewhere, temperature decreases have been shown to cause physico-chemical
changes, altering the abundance of nematodes and increasing deep sea biodiversity (Danovaro et al., 2004). In
terrestrial ecosystems, Midgley et al. (2003) estimate that in the Cape Floristic Region most species (17 out of 28
studied) will suffer contraction in their range with predicted climate change, while the remaining eleven will show
range expansions. Specic impacts will be complex and not all will be negative. Nevertheless, most authors
conclude that ora and fauna are highly vulnerable to even very small changes in temperature and that the
consequences of climate change will have potentially large-scale impacts that are almost impossible to predict.
(4) Climate change on land degradation
It is primarily through changes in rainfall patterns and in biomass production that climate change will affect land
degradation. The erosivities of climates change with changes in total rainfall, such that raindrop sizes and the
intensity of storms is generally greatest in the range 500 to 750 mm mean annual rainfall, this being the zone where
rainfall is sufcient to cause several severe thunderstorms but is insufcient to give a good vegetation cover.
Sediment yields in single events in deserts can sometimes be huge (e.g. the Namib: Marker, 1977), and in some
climate-change scenarios such conditions are predicted to increase. A survey of the potential impact of future
climate change in South Africa concludes that the currently most severely degraded parts of the country are likely
to become even more susceptible (Meadows and Hoffman, 2003).
(5) Biodiversity on climate change
Land-use change is the principal way that biodiversity is reduced, and this may impact regional and global
climates through surface-energy budgets as well as through the carbon cycle (Pielke et al., 2002). Land change has
an increasingly signicant role on climate change through such effects as El Nino events (Wu and Newell, 1998)
and the changing incidence of thunderstorms (Lyons, 1999). Tropical deforestation is undoubtedly the major
process translating loss in biodiversity to effects on climate (OBrien, 2000).
(6) Biodiversity on land degradation
Changes in land use that alter biodiversity similarly impact land degradation. Shifting cultivation is often identied
as a major driver in tropical forests that causes an overall diminution of the productive potential of the land. In the
Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh, for example, Gafur et al. (2003) used paired catchments to examine the effect of
clearing and cultivation with long-term fallow and mixed perennial vegetation. Each had signicantly different
induced levels of biodiversity consequent on change in land use. Soil losses in the year of cultivation were over six-
times higher than in the other land stages and uses. Such empirical ndings are well known in all climates: as
vegetation cover diminishes, soil losses increase exponentially. The synergy here between biodiversity and land
degradation is, however, indirect it is not the biodiversity change that affects the land degradation, it is the
consequence of a third factor, land-use change, that induces the degradation.
For the three Rio conventions, the many links between biodiversity protection, mitigation of climate change and
control of land degradation offer complementarities that are only now starting to be grasped in the implementation of
the conventions (UNDP, 2002). Individual assessments of biodiversity (by UNEP, 1995), climate change (by IPCC,
2001) and land degradation (by FAO, 2003) have established the complexity of the links at global level. The linkages
have also been recognized in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment to be published in 2005 (see Figure 1). One of
Figure 1. Feedback loops between the major global environmental change componentsland degradation, biodiversity and climate change.
Source: adapted after an original prepared for MA, 2004.
the most pervasive of the complex links is that derived from widespread deforestation. This converts forest into
carbon dioxide, reduces the vegetative cover for CO
2
storage and reduces the water-holding capacity of the soil
thereby inducing land degradation. This may, in turn, lead to changing weather patterns. So, it is argued by
UNDP (2002), a programme for sustainable management of the land including forests and agriculture, as
provided for in Operational Program 15 of the GEF (2003), will limit global warming and conserve some
biodiversity.
In turn, changes in weather patterns and climate affect natural forests, which are the most important sources of
biological diversity. They will change grasslands especially in semiarid zones, affecting wildlife and some of the
most vulnerable human societies. Global warming will drive sea-level rise, and changing ocean currents will affect
sh and marine life. On land the increased surface temperatures could result in reduced vegetation cover, which
will affect soil biodiversity through enhanced exposure to higher temperatures. Since soils are the main terrestrial
pool of carbon, xing of carbon (or sequestration) is the single best option for limiting atmospheric CO
2
concentration and mitigating climate change (Watson et al., 2000). Again, sustainable management of land, or
land degradation control, could be the primary buffer for society to utilize against the drivers of climate change and
altered weather patterns.
Through synergistic effects, the case for land degradation control as the principal practical means of delivering
global benets in biodiversity and climate change is compelling. Even though, as noted above, the UNCCD, is the
weakest of the three conventions, the two other conventions, the CBD and UNFCC, recognize in their literature the
importance of cooperation and the planning of programmes to exploit these linkages and synergies. The translation
of the rhetoric into reality has, however, been slow. The GEF Land Degradation Linkage Study (Berry and Olson,
2001) found signicant barriers to building land degradation as a critical component of the global environmental
change agenda and few GEF projects in the biodiversity and even fewer in the climate change focal areas
addressed land degradation unless it was specically identied at the outset. The study concluded that GEF
projects with a strong land degradation component are fewer than previously thought. Not surprisingly, the
UNCCD plays the joint programme approach more strongly than the other conventions, particularly in research,
training, observation and information collection and exchange (UNDP, 2002). However, its access to GEF funds
only after 2002 and the imperfections of its other funding agency, the Global Mechanism, have meant that the
linkages have rarely been exploited. Indeed, land degradation control has been primarily articulated as control of
desertication, which still continues today, and probably explains why the goals of the UNCCD are most unlikely
to be met at global level.
CONCEPTUALIZING THE LINKAGES FOR LAND DEGRADATION CONTROL
To counter the pessimistic conclusion derived above that the global objective of land degradation control is
unlikely to be achieved by the current focus solely on the processes of land degradation, two major initiatives have
been instituted in order to conceptualize the linkages between global change components and introduce them as
working models for land degradation assessment and then control. The rst is the Feedback Loops model
developed by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA, 2004). This is essentially a schematic way of
presenting the linkages to highlight how the major components are linked. So, for example, biodiversity loss,
expressed in the loss of plant species diversity reduces overall primary production, thus impairing the carbon sink
function. Reduced carbon sequestration driven by biodiversity loss, along with increased carbon dioxide emissions
driven by soil erosion increases the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which then functions as a
greenhouse gas causing global atmospheric temperatures to rise. Figure 1 presents a model of the main linkages
and threats to ecosystem services driven by any change in one of the major global environmental components. It
helps to demonstrate the multiple points of potential intervention for land degradation control. Soil conservation
may be the most immediate, but equally effective could be measures to stem biodiversity loss, such as increased
water use efciency, and maintenance of the soil carbon reserve.
The second model is more truly conceptual in embracing the process and factor linkages of environmental
functions. The DPSIR (Driving Force, Pressure, State, Impact, Response) model, the prototype for which was
developed for the OECD (1993), has been adopted as a policy tool to identify management options for a range of
types of environmental problem. It captures the driving forces and pressureslargely controlled by human
activityand their effects on the environmental system and state of natural resources (Figure 2). For land
degradation assessment and the identication of ways of control, the impacts and societal responses are especially
important, enabling the assessment process to feed directly into measures for control of land degradation. The
model has been adopted by the new multi-national Land Degradation Assessment in Drylands project of the FAO,
GEF and UNEP (FAO, 2003) to identify suitable entry points for assessing the seriousness of degradation and for
identifying potential points of intervention.
CONCLUSION
Concern for the extent and seriousness of land degradation is reassuming its rightful place within the international
community since the Second Global Environment Facility Assembly in Beijing in 2002. Land degradation does,
indeed, have serious consequences for the worlds drylands and for some of the most marginal and poverty-
stricken societies globally. It is, however, largely a local problem, suggesting local solutions, such as better soil
conservation and attention to local policies. It is not immediately a global concern, even though attention to it is
mandated by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertication. A different approach to land degradation
control might dwell on how it poses major threats for the other two main global environmental change
components, biodiversity and climate change.
Figure 2. The DPSIR (Driving Force, Pressure, State, Impacts, Response) Conceptual Framework applied to potential land degradation control
interventions.
The legacy of hyperbole and misuse of messages as to the seriousness of land degradation is now thankfully
being forgotten as a new generation of projects on the assessment of land degradation is being initiated and new
models, such as the DPSIR framework, are being employed in place of the simplistic technical approaches of the
past. The initial US$250 million allocated to land degradation in Operational Program 15 of the GEF is being used
to tackle land degradation in innovative ways often through primary attention to developmental constraints, such
as poor governance, food insecurity and poverty, but also linked to protecting biodiversity and controlling climate
change. However, it remains a technical challenge as to how land degradation control might be addressed more
directly and effectively.
In order to translate concern for land degradation into appropriate policy and technical responses, a new
approach is needed that focuses on the synergies and interlinkages with the other global environmental change
components. Not only is an approach to land degradation control through attention to biodiversity and climate
change likely to be more acceptable to the international donor community, but also it will provide a stronger, more
ecologically sound way of addressing the complex linkages between issues that have acknowledged global
importance. Additionally, the rhetoric of the biodiversity and climate change lobbies that their measures will
address land degradation and promote sustainable land management needs to be translated into real projects and
programmes that utilize the synergies between all global environmental change components. Land degradation
control has major global benets, not just to counter land degradation but to initiate a new generation of projects
that promote sustainable land management as the vehicle to a future with conservation of biodiversity, control of
climate change and prevention of land degradation simultaneously achieved.
acknowledgements
We acknowledge the following for their support for our work: the IGU Commission on Land Degradation, which
hosted a conference in Iceland at which an early version of this paper was given in oral form; the United Nations
University, which has sponsored some of our work through the project on People, Land Management and
Environmental Change (PLEC), 19962002; The United Nations Environment Programme, the UN Food and
Agriculture Organization and the Global Environment Facility, through the project Land Degradation Assessment
in Drylands; the University of Iceland.
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