Land decay to displace tens of millions, global survey warns

Land degradation will unleash a mass migration of at least 50 million people by 2050 -- as many as 700 million unless humans stop depleting the life-giving resource, dozens of scientists warned today.

Already, land decay caused by unsustainable farming, mining, pollution, and city expansion is undermining the well-being of some 3.2 billion people -- 40 per cent of the global population, they said in the first comprehensive assessment of land health.

The condition of land is "critical," said the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

"We've converted large amounts of our forests, we've converted large amounts of our grasslands, we've lost 87 percent of our wetlands... we've really changed our land surface in the last several hundred years," IPBES chairman Robert Watson said of the findings.

"The message is: land degradation, loss of productivity of those soils and those vegetations will force people to move. It will be no longer viable to live on those lands," he told AFP.

"Between now and 2050, we estimate the number could be 50 (million) to some 700 million people."
It assumes "we're actually starting to be much more sustainable, we've really tried hard to have sustainable agricultural practices, sustainable forestry, we've tried to minimize climate change."
"In the extreme desert areas we are finding deep aquifers, and we're pumping up, unsustainably, ancient water resources to irrigate."
"If we did not have land degradation across the world our economy would be 10 percent stronger," Watson elaborated. "This is a major economic issue for the world."