Land degradation: the convention, the Atlas and the neutrality target

Prelims and MainsCurrent affairs on this: Land degradation, desertification and drylands

Desertification is not the spread of deserts; it is land degradation in drylands, the arid, semi arid and dry sub humid zones where rain is under two thirds of what evaporation would take, which is about 69 per cent of India. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, the third Rio convention alongside climate and biodiversity, was adopted in 1994, and its goal since 2015 is land degradation neutrality, target 15.3 of the Sustainable Development Goals: the area of healthy land held stable or growing by 2030, what is degraded balanced by what is restored. India hosted the fourteenth conference of the parties at Delhi in 2019 and raised its target to 26 million hectares restored by 2030. The measure at home is the Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas of the Space Applications Centre, whose 2021 edition put 97.85 million hectares, 29.77 per cent of the country, under degradation.

• The processes, in the Atlas's order: water erosion, the loss of topsoil to runoff, on about 11 per cent of the country; vegetation degradation, forest and grassland thinning, about 9 per cent; wind erosion, in the Thar and the coasts, about 5.5 per cent; then salinity, waterlogging, mining and settlement. Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana carry most of it.
• The convention: 197 parties, secretariat at Bonn, a Global Land Outlook as its flagship report, a Drought Initiative, and conferences every two years, Delhi in 2019 with the Delhi Declaration, Abidjan in 2022, Riyadh in 2024, Mongolia in 2026, where drought was the agenda, as the convention subject records.
• The pledges: the Bonn Challenge of 2011 asks the world to bring 150 million hectares under restoration by 2020 and 350 million by 2030; India joined in 2015 with 21 million hectares and raised it to 26 million at Delhi in 2019, the same figure as its neutrality target, and reports progress under both. The Bonn Challenge subject carries the latest report.
• The schemes: watershed development, treating a catchment from ridge to valley so that rain is held where it falls, run since 2015 as the watershed component of the Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana; the Aravalli Green Wall of 2023, a belt from Gujarat to Delhi modelled on Africa's Great Green Wall of the Sahel; the Green India Mission and the Green Credit Programme on the afforestation theme; and the Soil Health Card on the agriculture theme, since soil organic carbon is the measure of degraded farmland.
• The institutions and the science: the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics at Hyderabad, set up in 1972, breeds the dryland crops, sorghum, millets, chickpea, pigeonpea and groundnut; the Central Arid Zone Research Institute at Jodhpur works on the desert; and sand and dust storms, ravines along the Chambal and Yamuna, and mine land reclamation are the forms degradation takes that a question names.

Mains: Neutrality is a balance, not a ban: degradation continues wherever land is farmed hard, so meeting the 2030 target means restoring as much as is lost, and the two levers that reach the most hectares are watershed treatment on rainfed farmland and forest quality, not new plantations on land that was never forest.

See also: United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification · Bonn Challenge · Watershed development · The India State of Forest Report: what the numbers mean · Compensatory afforestation, the CAMPA money and the schemes outside forests · Farming practices and inputs a question tests: natural farming, nano urea, SRI and the rest