Prospects are not encouraging

Climate change has caused 77.6% of Earth’s land to become drier over the last three decades compared to 30 years ago. According to Channel 24, citing a United Nations report, the area of ​​arid type soils has reached a size exceeding the size of India and now covers 40.6 percent of the Earth’s land, excluding Antarctica.

The findings warn that if this trend continues, up to five billion people could be living in drylands by the end of the century, leading to soil depletion, water depletion and the destruction of vital ecosystems.

The drought crisis has been documented with scientific accuracy for the first time, revealing an existential threat affecting billions of people around the world.
– says Ibrahim Tiau, secretary general of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

He says that when the climate in a particular region dries out, the opportunity for a return to former conditions is lost. The drier climate that now affects large areas around the world will not return to past conditions, and this change means “rethinking life on Earth.”

As climate change causes the planet’s temperature to increase, water evaporates more easily and quickly from the surface and remains in the atmosphere longer. This leads to several consequences:

• First, the land remains without rain for longer periods of time.
• Secondly, when it dries out it loses its ability to absorb water as effectively as before.
• Thirdly, rains have become rare and now accumulate in large masses and fall simultaneously; Under other circumstances this amount will be evenly distributed over time. Huge streams do not have time to be absorbed by the arid lands and flow away, causing floods and disasters, but there is not enough irrigation.
• Finally, more water vapor in the atmosphere means an increase in the greenhouse effect because water vapor is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases. This begins a self-sustaining, closed-loop process in which heat turns water into steam, steam traps heat, and heat turns more water into even more steam.

This entire complex is pushing much of the planet into increasingly arid conditions, eventually turning once-green forests into arid grasslands and depleting the moisture needed for life and agriculture.

This problem, along with destructive land use and irrational use of water resources, is already almost three billion people and more than half of world food production They are facing “unprecedented stress” on their water systems. Drought currently affects 40% of the world’s agricultural land and 2.3 billion people; It causes forest fires to increase, agriculture to decrease and mass migration to accelerate. Particularly affected areas are almost all of Europe, the western part of the USA, Brazil, East Asia and Central Africa.

However, the authors of the report argue that if precautions are taken, the future will not look so bleak. Their proposed comprehensive roadmap to address the crisis includes improving drought monitoring, smarter use of land and water resources, and strengthening resilience and cooperation within and among communities around the world.

Without joint efforts, billions of people will face a future marked by hunger, population displacement and economic decline. Only by adopting innovative solutions and strengthening global solidarity can humanity overcome this challenge. The question is not whether we have the tools to respond, but whether we have the will to act.
– said Barron Orr, Chief Scientific Officer of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification.

Looking at all these proposals and remembering our modest successes in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we can already say that humanity has almost no chance.