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Share Twitter Pinterest Email. Planet Earth Conservation Weather Outdoors. Benefits of this response include providing habitat for a greater diversity of wildlife, healing lands that have been impacted by construction activities, and eliminating conditions favorable to starting wildfires, all of which would be instrumental in reversing desertification.
Holistic Management For generations researches have concluded that both wild and domesticated grazing animals are a major cause of desertification, which is generally true. What researches have failed to understand is that the grazing animals are not the problem. The problem rather, is that they are not managed with respect to the land. Prior to the adverse impacts of human intervention via agriculture, nature had developed a balanced system consisting of migrating grazing and predatory animals.
According to American pioneers, like Louis and Clark, grassland areas would be settled for only a few days by a herd of grazing animals. These benefits are nutriment implements that induce the grass to decay biologically thereby providing for healthier regrowth while the land is being rested during the gap in the migration cycle. The current practices of land management that have been implemented since the beginning of conventional agriculture consist of either over grazing or no grazing also known as over rest.
Over grazing by livestock, such as cattle, sheep, and goats leave the soil bare with minimal chance for recovery due to the extreme daily changes in temperature within the soil microclimate. No grazing or over rest causes hardened algae to form on the surface, which increases runoff and prevents plants from getting sufficient water. Overtime, plants will decay via oxidation and the soil becomes bare for the same reasons already stated. Both practices lead to the same end result of desertification.
Holistic Planned Grazing, or Management Intensive Grazing MiG , gives rise to a planned grazing strategy that has been proven to reverse desertification. This practice has worked in many arid and semi-arid regions of world where desertification has occurred.
This can benefit the youth of the country," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from his village in Burkina Faso. The country dips into a semi-arid zone below the Sahara desert known as the Sahel, where climate change and land overuse are making it increasingly difficult to farm, experts say.
Sawadogo initially faced resistance for his unconventional technique, based on an ancient method that had fallen out of practice. Now "zai" have been adopted by aid agencies working to prevent hunger in the region. Nellie Peyton , Journalist, Reuters Foundation. This article is published in collaboration with Thomson Reuters Foundation trust. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.
Glaciers support life in fragile ecosystems and provide vital freshwater. As recognized by the UNCCD, such interventions are to be implemented at local to global scales , with the active engagement of stakeholders and local communities. Improved information generation and access, as noted in the final section, will help create enabling conditions for this implementation S Societal and policy responses vary according to the degree of desertification that a society faces.
In areas where desertification processes are at the early stages or are relatively minor, it is possible to arrest the process and restore key services in the degraded areas. The adverse impacts of desertification on dryland ecosystem services and limited success in rehabilitation demonstrate that it is more cost-effective to prevent desertification C Addressing desertification is critical and essential to meeting the Millennium Development Goals.
Approximately half of the people worldwide who live below the poverty line live in drylands. The combination of high variability in ecosystem conditions in drylands and high levels of poverty leads to a situation where societies are vulnerable to a further decline in human well-being.
Addressing desertification therefore facilitates eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, as envisioned in the MDGs. This also complements directly the policies to be included in NAPs to combat desertification C Young people can play a key role in this process.
Evidence from a growing body of case studies demonstrates that dryland populations , building on long-term experience and active innovation, can stay ahead of desertification by improving agricultural practices and enhancing pastoral mobility in a sustainable way. For example, in many areas of the Sahel region, land users are achieving higher productivity by capitalizing on improved organization of labor, more extensive soil and water conservation, increased use of mineral fertilizer and manure, and new market opportunities C Integrated land and water management are key methods of desertification prevention.
All measures that protect soils from erosion, salinization , and other forms of soil degradation effectively prevent desertification. Sustainable land use can address human activities such as overgrazing, overexploitation of plants, trampling of soils, and unsustainable irrigation practices that exacerbate dryland vulnerability. Management strategies include measures to spread the pressures of human activities, such as transhumance rotational use of rangelands and well sites, stocking rates matched to the carrying capacity of ecosystems , and diverse species composition.
Improved water management practices can enhance water-related services. These may include use of traditional water-harvesting techniques, water storage, and diverse soil and water conservation measures.
Maintaining management practices for water capture during intensive rainfall episodes also helps prevent surface runoff that carries away the thin, fertile, moisture-holding topsoil.
Protection of vegetative cover can be a major instrument for prevention of desertification. Maintaining vegetative cover to protect soil from wind and water erosion is a key preventive measure against desertification.
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