Each year, $6.3 trillion is lost to land degradation, while the net benefits of achieving the targets of land restoration initiatives like the Bonn Challenge are between $7 and $9 trillion a year. Somehow, we must stop the tug of war and make a concerted effort to pitch in and restore land. We have also seen concerted efforts to introduce sustainable intensification through good agronomic and forestry practices on agricultural landscapes to conserve ecosystems. Throughout history, we have seen how those with the most economic power often protect their interests by denigrating, enslaving and persecuting those who aim to hold onto their lands and livelihoods. author Mary Maples Dodge in Hans Brinker (1865) trying to plug a hole in the dike to save his country from flooding. This is tantamount to the little Dutch boy immortalized by U.S. To try and reverse the damage, scientists, farmers, foresters and many others are now faced with a monumental task: the need to restore millions of hectares of land. Natural grasslands are disappearing, and modelling has shown that due to melting permafrost in the far northern boreal regions the carbon sink capacity of peatlands could become considerably lower due to global heating after 2050 under high planet-warming temperature scenarios as soil becomes more mineralized. It is not only tropical forests that we are destroying. From the collapse of the Mycenaean economy in ancient Greece to the current pace of destruction of the Amazon in Brazil, deforestation and land degradation is a battle that seemingly never ends.ĭespite ample scientific warning, our planet now hovers on the verge of catastrophic climate change as great chunks of glaciers fall into the sea and melt due to global warming brought on by fossil-fuel emissions and exacerbated by the destruction of our tropical forests. The tug of war between profits, sustainable land management and conservation has been documented in scientific literature for centuries and in classical literature for millennia. Sadly, far fewer of us have had a hand in restoration. We are all to blame.įrom subsistence societies through colonization to our current perilous state of unsustainable overconsumption, all of us have had a hand in ecosystem degradation. Indeed, we have lost as much forest in the last century as we did in the previous 9,000 years to devastating effect given forests’ oversized influence on the planet. Humanity’s insatiable appetite to profit from resource extraction through deforestation and by disturbing the rhythms of the natural environment has accelerated over time and is largely responsible. Most often, it results from an inclination to set forests ablaze to clear land, which leads to roughly 2 percent of the earth’s terrestrial surface being burned every year. Of all the negative things that humans have inflicted on the planet, the deliberate removal of forest cover ranks among the worst due to the negative consequences for food security, the climate and biodiversity.
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