Desertification -- climate change-triggered degradation of land ecosystems -- might, in a decade, create 50 million refugees, the Economics of Land Degradation (ELD), a global initiative led by 30 different research groups, warned in a new study published Tuesday. The study, backed by the United Nations, also found that $6.3 trillion to $10.6 trillion worth of resources -- equivalent to up to 17 percent of the world’s GDP -- were lost annually due to land degradation.Water.
“Our lands are no longer able to keep up with the pressures placed on its limited resources. Increasing misuse and demands for its goods are resulting in rapidly intensifying desertification and land degradation globally -- an issue of growing importance for all people and at all scales,” the report, titled “The Value of Land,” said.
International Business Times
Land Degradation, Desertification Might Create 50 Million Climate Refugees Within A Decade
Avaneesh Pandey
2 comments:
So time consuming and futile to correct all the mis-information and delusions of the progressive movement, this is why I've stopped supporting all the progressive causes, completely out to lunch. The level of ignorance is just profound. I don't know why exactly, maybe because people live in cities and are disconnected from food production and the outdoors. Notice how he implies there is a problem with agriculture but then shifts and talks about other issues? Land use for agriculture has been falling steadily for decades. It now takes 69% less land to produce the same amount of food it did 50 years ago. Increased agricultural productivity due to integrated pest management, farming methods, C02 fortification of the atmosphere, GMOs and other developments have improved crop yields. Even with a rapidly growing population, the amount of land in cultivation hasn't changed since the 1990s but the predictions of catastrophe never seem to relent. The future predictions of land use for farming are lower, not growing and higher.
http://ourworldindata.org/data/food-agriculture/land-use-in-agriculture/#correlates-determinants-consequences
The biggest threat to the improvements we've had in land use is organic farming and bio-fuels. Organic yields on average are 30% lower than conventional farming. It would undo decades of progress on land use if the organic consumers aren't made aware of the consequences of their consumption, not to mention the balloon greenhouse gas emmissions and increase pollution in streams and rivers from nitrogen rich organic fertilizers like cow dung and pesticides that are over-applied and cause terrible run-off pollution compared to modern farming methods. This for example is how a field is organically sterilized before planting. All the creatures in the soil are fried with torches using propane or butane fuel. Not something that Whole Foods market likes to advertise though in wide spread use by their farmers. Bio-fuels have mostly been dropped from government energy policy world wide but it too would increase the amount of cropland in use.
According to Science instead of progressive politics, earth getting greener and wetter not drier and covered in desertification.
http://phe.rockefeller.edu/docs/Nature_Rebounds.pdf
Remember these gems of progressive politics?
Only off by 4.41 million square KMs. We only have about 30 years of data so we don't really know what is normal.
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