https://arab.news/y7qaw
A report by the UN in May warned that more than 1.5 billion people are at risk due to the rapid, largely unnoticed, degradation of rangeland, which is defined as land used for grazing or hunting.
It said a mix of factors, including faulty policies, climate change and rising populations, are negatively affecting the rangeland that covers more than 54 percent of the Earth’s surface. It adds that more than 50 percent of rangeland has been degraded, the signs of which include diminished soil fertility, erosion, and rising salinity or alkanization of soil, resulting in inhibited plant growth.
The poor health of rangeland worldwide is a very worrying development as it provides more than 17 percent of the global food supply and also about a third of the Earth’s carbon storage.
The degradation has occurred primarily as a result of changes in land use, as rangeland is increasingly converted to farmland or developed to build factories, homes and offices as a result of increasing urbanization.
Even on rangeland that is still used for pastoral purposes, excessive grazing by pastoralists causes damage, as do government policies that incentivize over-exploitation, a trend seen in Brazil until recently.
Despite the dramatic increase in the degradation, much of it has gone largely unnoticed, perhaps because there is very little awareness of rangeland and its........