This December, the United Nation Convention to Combat Desertification’s 16th Conference of Parties (UNCCD COP16) brought together world leaders to discuss desertification, land degradation and drought, all of which have detrimental impacts on planetary security well beyond climate change. To name but one example, in Nigeria, the economic hardship resulting from water scarcity and land degradation has created favourable conditions for the Jihadist organization Boko Haram to recruit impoverished farmers. At UNCCD COP16, over $12 billion was pledged to address land degradation’s impact on climate security. Additionally, the Great Green Wall, an African-led initiative launched in 2021, announced a plan to restore 100 million hectares of degraded land in the Sahel by 2030. Saudi Arabia also launched the REMDY project, an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven platform for land health assessment. While these initiatives signal that countries are starting to get serious about dealing with land degradation and its security impacts, this is a double-edged sword. Regreening – a prominent form of land restoration – can have negative impacts on local ecosystems, too.
Many land restoration initiatives focus on forest cover; the UN and other prominent organisations in the field define forests as areas with more than 10% tree cover. Yet, many non-forest ecosystems that are dotted with trees (e.g. savannahs) also fall under this category and risk being erroneously targeted by efforts to increase tree cover in a process known as afforestation, causing the loss of vital ecosystem services such as water, food and medicinal plant provision. This trend is particularly worrying as a recent study published in Science found that multiple countries on the African continent including Mali and Chad – which are both part of the Great Green Wall Initiative – have already pledged to restore more forest than they have available (under the AFR100 land restoration initiative). Moreover, the effect of afforestation is compounded by the frequent use of non-native species in land restoration efforts, which can become invasive, contributes to land degradation themselves, negatively impact water, food and livelihood security and exacerbate conflict.
To be sure: land restoration in the Sahel and beyond will be critical to achieve climate security; however, the forest-centric vision of land restoration must be revised. The definition of forests must be updated and become more nuanced to enable appropriate categorisation and land restoration measures. In arid grassy areas, effective land restoration measures include resting periods from cattle grazing, removing woody encroachments (including those resulting from misguided regreening efforts) and re-planting native grasses. Moving away from planting trees as a primary form of land restoration does not mean compromising on carbon storage either as healthy rangelands also store large amounts of carbon. Additionally, land restoration initiatives should refrain from using non-native crops without thorough ecological assessment, to avoid introducing invasive species. The Great Green Wall Initiative and other land restoration efforts such as the AFR100 initiative have to ensure that these nuances are integrated into their regreening plans if they are to achieve their land restoration targets.
On a final note, amid the launch of the REMDY project – which uses AI to monitor land health – special attention will have to be paid to how digital technologies and smart systems are trained, and what their capabilities and limitations are in assessing land health. AI and similar technologies could undoubtably be useful to assess land health on a larger scale. However, overreliance on such tools at the expense of (human) expert assessments may also bear the risk that regreening efforts use inappropriate land restoration methods or erroneously target healthy ecosystems. In the future, the role of AI and digital technologies in this field must be critically engaged with to avoid adding to climate security challenges instead of mitigating them.
Recommended further readings:
Stepping back from the precipice: Transforming land management to stay within planetary boundaries
Terra Incognita: land degradation as underestimated threat amplifier
Conflation of reforestation with restoration is widespread
This article was written by PSI’s Esther Fütterer.
Photo credit: Jorge Cancela/Flickr.