Combating desertification

Past experience can help reclaim degraded land

The recently concluded 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) at Abidjan has called upon nations to invest in restoring degraded land for future prosperity. This counsel is especially relevant for a land-stressed country like India, where close to 30 per cent of the land falls in the degraded category. More worrying, the process of decline in the quality of land is still apace despite the government’s avowed resolve to achieve “land degradation neutrality” (zero addition to degraded land) by 2030. According to the data collected by the Indian Space Research Organisation through satellite imagery, the extent of deteriorated land has risen from 94.53 million hectares (mha) in 2003 to 97.85 mha in 2018-19. India has set a target of reclaiming 26 mha of this degraded land by 2030. But going by the progress made till now, the goal may remain elusive.

The country is paying a heavy price for laxity on this front. New Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute had assessed the losses due to decline in land productivity at worth around Rs 3.17 trillion in 2014-15, amounting to about 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product in that year. About 82 per cent of these losses were attributed to the deterioration in the quality of land under agriculture, forests, and pastures, and the remaining to the changes in the land-use pattern — diverting land to less productive use. This study, significantly, had also underscored the need to expedite implementing land improvement projects as the cost of land reclamation could rise above the potential economic gains by 2030.

Among the major factors responsible for land degradation, the most significant ones are soil salinity and water-logging in agricultural fields due to flawed agronomic practices, and water and wind erosion in the areas that have lost their vegetative cover. In the Northeast, a hilly region, the continuation of the outmoded and environmentally ruinous practice of shifting cultivation, also known as slash-and-burn agriculture or jhum, is the main cause of land degradation. Under this system, the farmers clear the forested land, cultivate it for a few years, and then move to another spot, leaving the old patch barren.

Globally, about 40 per cent of the land, supporting about half of humanity, is facing the threat of desertification. In the business as usual scenario, an additional area equivalent of the size of South America, might get degraded by 2050, warn the papers presented at the COP15. This global summit has, therefore, urged the 196 participating nations to reclaim 1 billion hectares of degraded land by 2030. India is fortunate to have time-tested technologies capable of rejuvenating problematic lands. These have already been tried successfully in reclaiming the sprawling salt-affected tracks in Haryana and the lime quarrying-hit slopes of the Mussoorie hills in Uttarakhand, besides stabilising the shifting sand dunes in the Thar Desert of Rajasthan. These should now come in handy for the country to achieve its self-determined target of restoring 26 mha of degraded land by 2030. However, more important would be to make soil conservation an integral part of all land-related programmes to curb further deterioration in this limited natural resource and contribute to meeting the COP15’s main objective of combating desertification and acquiring resilience against droughts.