Global Desertification Prevention and Control
Currently, the global desertification area has reached 38 million square kilometers, accounting for a quarter of the total land area, covering more than 110 countries and expanding by 50,000 to 70,000 square kilometers each year. It is difficult for one billion people to get adequate food and clothing due to desertification. It is also common occurrence that sandstorms destroy farmland and cause casualties. The dire economic losses reach over 40 billion dollars totally each year.
To draw world attention to desertification prevention and control, early in the 1990s, the UN General Assembly approved the establishment of UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and set June 17 as “World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought” since 1995 to further enhance people’s awareness of the importance of combating desertification and arouse people’s sense of responsibility and sense of urgency towards combating desertification. Since the first “World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought”, protecting human’s home and accelerating desertification governance has become a common mission for all nations in the world as well as a frontier field of international scientific researches. All countries in the world actively and continuously have been exploring countermeasures to combat desertification, and have accumulated rich experience and developed models.
Back in the 1930s, the US had issued a special law to encourage private land owners to plant trees and grass through policy support, which effectively curbed the rapid expansion of desertification; India compiled desertification development series chart with satellites, and developed a series of new technologies of binding the movement of sand; Israel, located in the desert areas known as cancer of the earth, implemented high-tech and high investment strategy to rationally develop and utilize limited land and water resources, and has created high-yield, high-efficiency brilliant achievements. At the Rio+20 Conference in 2012, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification Organization proposed the goal of “Zero Net Land Degradation” by 2030.
