Abu Dhabi: As the world celebrated World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on August 12, the Gulf Cooperation Council’s celebration this year comes amidst efforts to confront desertification with a new partnership with the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), with the aim to harness the strategic vision of the rulers of the GCC states, and that of the rulers of UAE and Dubai in particular, to ensure that sustainable development is built on sustainable management of the most vulnerable and vital resources: land and water, UNCCD said on Tuesday.
Luc Gnacadja, UNCCD’s Executive Secretary, and Mikhael Jaime Shamis, President of World Youth Bank, signed a partnership agreement in Dubai to mobilise resources and carry out high-level advocacy in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states.
“The aim of signing this agreement in Dubai is to marshal finances for the Convention’s Supplementary Trust Fund and advocate and raise awareness among the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states, including rallying celebrities to support the Convention’s cause and participate in its major events,” said Gnacadja.
He added: “The establishment of this Task Force comes at an opportune moment. We are at the halfway mark in the implementation of the Ten-Year Strategy (2008-2018) and at the beginning of implementing the outcomes on desertification, land degradation and drought agreed by world leaders last year at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio + 20.”
For his part, Shamis said that the partnership is backed by a resource mobilisation task force to be based in Dubai with jurisdiction over the GCC member states, namely, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the world has to make concerted efforts in order to reduce desertification threats.
“This is a new chapter in the long struggle that GCC members have engaged in, in their fight against desertification,” said Shamis,” calling on the leaders of the GCC region “to heed the call of supporting activities to preserve our land, our planet”.
Worrisome figures
UNCCD said that every year, the world is losing 12 million hectares of land, where growing some 20 million tonnes of grain is possible. Likewise, 24 billion tonnes of fertile soil is disappearing annually, and the surface area lost over the past 20 years is equal to all of the farmland of the USA.
“Between 1961 and 2009, per capita arable land in sub-Saharan Africa fell by about 76 square metres a year, the steepest drop in the world. In all this, 1.5 billion people in the world depend on degrading land for food, water and jobs. Globally, 1.5 billion people and 42 per cent of the very poor live on degraded lands,” said UNCCD.
