BONN, Germany, December 3, 2018 /3BL Media/ - Innovation and investments worth trillions of dollars in landscape restoration, climate adaptation and science-based policy advice will be needed if the global community is to meet the escalating threats posed by climate change.
In the last five years ICRAF has helped establish comprehensive soil information systems in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ghana and Nigeria. Malawi is determined to be next.
Africa has over 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land but remains a major food importer. Even though agricultural production has grown by 130% over the past 30 years, with 18 Sub-Saharan countries halving the proportion of hungry people, more needs to be done. Soil is Africa’s most important natural resource: healthy and fertile soils are the cornerstones of food security.
Domestication of forest products that are overharvested in the wild is expected to have two types of benefits: help with protection of the remaining wild resource; and provide income for local producers. Both claims are more easily stated than substantiated and may partially contradict each other.
It could happen that domestication lowers prices to such a level that destructive harvesting is no longer worth its while. But before that happens, the claimed benefits for local incomes will have evaporated.
For a long time, a majority of African countries have not been proactively mitigating the negative impact of drought and flood events. As a result, relief initiatives are often too late to stem the loss of lives and other social and economic impacts. To address this challenge, and assessing tree-based data from 1665 through 2014, scientists developed the TANA chronology, a historic dataset named after Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile River running through Ethiopia.
Land degradation is at the nexus of a vicious spiral which links low land productivity and biodiversity loss with poverty, hunger, instability and insecurity. Land degradation, for instance, releases carbon, worsening global climate change; it reduces crop yield, creating food insecurity; and it erodes livelihoods, driving migration. Under these conditions, instability can take hold, order can break down, and non-state armed groups can become established, leading in turn to impacts such as increases in wildlife poaching, deforestation and violence.
Land degradation has long been recognized as a major problem which threatens ecological health, social stability and economic prosperity. For several decades, a series of solutions have been devised and attempted with varying degrees of success. However, efforts to combat land degradation have been hampered by a lack of resources and the sheer scale of the problem.
As economies and populations grow, land degradation and growing competition for land threatens to multiply this challenge.
Opening the IUCN/ICRAF event ‘Integrated approaches for multifunctional landscapes: connecting LDN, biodiversity and climate change’ at the recent UNCCD summit, Ms Barbut laid out in stark terms the challenge of meeting the world’s growing demand for food. The global community has committed itself to meeting environmental targets including achieving land degradation neutrality (LDN), safeguarding biodiversity and mitigating climate change, and developing countries in particular are struggling with the added burdens this requires.
80% of farmers in India are rainfed smallholders who cultivate on 2 hectares of land or less. Taking cognizance of the multiple benefits of agroforestry, India became the first country to adopt a national agroforestry policy in 2014.
India designed the policy with the goal to improve productivity, create employment opportunities, generate income and meet the ever-increasing demand for timber, food, fuel, fodder, fertiliser and fibre from a growing population.