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Contributions from
the Column
Monitor
Tsunami relief: Too much of a good thing
Merits and limts of contract farming
EU sugar regime: Double-edged pledge
Afghanistan’s drug cultivation at a record high
US government agency assesses Millenium Challenge Account
More votes for emerging nations at IMF
Oil: World Bank and Chad reach agreement
Slow progress in fight against desertification
Private sector: Making money in peace
10/2006
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[ Desertification ]
Time to stop burying our heads in the sand
Desertification is threatening 40 % of the Earth’s surface. The United Nations consider desertification one of the greatest global-environment problems and an important cause of poverty. Nonetheless, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) has borne little fruit so far. It was adopted at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and has since been ratified by 191 nations. The fact that industrialised countries do not support the Convention sufficiently is normally explained away by saying desertification is only a problem for developing countries. But that view is misleading, says Klaus Töpfer, former director of the UN Environment Programme, as desertification has been underway in southern Europe for a long time. However, the public was neither aware of this fact, nor of the phenomenon’s close inter-relatedness with climate change and loss of biodiversity. At a conference held by the German Development Ministry and its agency German Technical Cooperation last month in Berlin, Töpfer suggested merging the specific UN Conventions on all three issues, as resources are scarce. According to him, there are already more environmental refugees today than there are war refugees.
Imme Scholz, head of the Environment Department at the German Development Institute (DIE), maintains that, of 191 million migrants worldwide in 2005, 25 million fled on environmental grounds. In 2050, 150 million people worldwide are expected to leave their homeland because of climate change and soil erosion. Most high-risk countries are in Africa, where the shortage of arable land coincides with lack of fresh water and political instability. According to Scholz, the implementation of the UNCCD is important to prevent conflicts both in the migrant’s countries of origin and destinations.
A weak point of the Convention is its lack of clear objectives. So far, only 80 countries have drawn up national action plans, and many are only being implemented half-heartedly. The meeting in Berlin therefore suggested giving the Convention clear obligations and sanction mechanisms. It also called for the objectives to be reduced to the fundamental issues.
It was proposed that governments of desertification-prone countries cooperate more closely with civil society to implement their plans. Apart from financial support, incentives could be created for soil protection, for instance by rewarding environmental performance in a similar fashion to the C02 certification in the field of climate protection. Participants also stressed that the affected countries should definitely not be forced to tackle environmental protection at the expense of other development goals.
Silvia Richter
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