E-Paper
The dry facts
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) could not have chosen a more fitting theme than desertification for this year?s World Environment Day.
The United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) could not have chosen a more fitting theme than desertification for this year’s World Environment Day. The Unep’s report, Global Deserts Outlook (GDO), released on the occasion, makes this disquietingly clear. In a damning indictment of human-induced habitat destruction, the report says climate change, high water demand and even tourism are putting unprecedented pressures on the world’s desert ecosystems that make up a quarter of the planet’s land surface.
Undue focus on water-intensive agricultural crops depletes the renewable supplies of water that large rivers feed to deserts. At this rate, the Gariep River in southern Africa, the Rio Grande and Colorado in North America, the Tigris and Euphrates as well as the Amu Darya and Indus will all probably be threatened by 2025. Humans are harvesting trees faster than they can regenerate, overgrazing rangelands and converting them into deserts, overpumping aquifers and draining rivers dry. As a result, on an appalling swathe of cropland, soil erosion is exceeding new soil formation, which slowly deprives the soil of its inherent fertility. No wonder then that the GDO rightly fears desert cities in the US and West Asia may be “living on borrowed time” as water tables drop and supplies become undrinkable. It’s a shame that mega-threats like soil erosion, which jeopardise the livelihood and food supply of hundreds of millions, don’t even appear on the radar screen of many governments. After all, as the GDO points out, deserts can deliver huge economic benefits if managed sensibly. For instance, they have the potential to become the powerhouses of the next century, tapping the world’s solar energy and providing electricity across continents.
It is just as well that the Indian government is determined to strengthen the National Environment Policy (NEP), which was cleared in draft form by the cabinet last week. The NEP’s stress on agro-forestry and traditional farming methods as well as the proposed national afforestation programme through village and district levels spells good news on this World Environment Day that exhorts each one of us not to disturb the pristine desert cores — the planet’s last remaining areas of total wilderness.
