Alain-Richard Donwahi, the president of the UN’s desertification conference has warned that the world is likely to face major disruption to food supplies well before temperatures rise by the 1.5C target.
This is even as the impacts of the climate crisis combine with water scarcity and poor farming practices to threaten global agriculture.
Donwahi, a former Ivory Coast defence minister who led last year’s UN Cop15 summit on desertification, said that the effects of drought were taking hold more rapidly than expected.
“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted,” he was quoted as saying. “Everyone is fixated on 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5C.”
Donwahi said that the problems of rising temperatures, heatwaves and more intense droughts and floods, were endangering food security in many regions, including the effects of droughts on food security, the effects of droughts on migration of population, the effect of droughts on inflation.
“We could have an acceleration of negative effects, other than temperature,” he said. “Poor farming practices were not helping,” “The degradation of soil comes with bad habits, and the way we do our agriculture will lead to degradation of the soil. When the soil is affected, the yield is affected,”.
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As a way out of the current challenge, Donwahi called on private sector investors to get involved and take advantage of opportunities for turning a profit.
“The private sector has an interest in agriculture, and the better usage of the soil. We’re talking about [improving] yields. We’re talking about agroforestry, which is another way the private sector can have a return on investment,” he said. “We have to be innovative, to find new vehicles for finance.”
Recall that governments around the world signed a treaty pledging to combat desertification in 1992, alongside the UN framework convention on climate change, which is the parent treaty to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and the UN convention on biodiversity, which aims to safeguard species abundance.
However, the desertification treaty gains least attention, and last year’s Cop15 on desertification went largely unnoticed compared with the climate Cop27 and the biodiversity Cop15 last December. Desertification Cops are held less frequently than climate summits: the next desertification conference will be held in Riyadh in December 2024, while the next climate summit, Cop28, will be in Dubai in late November.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
