The world is likely to face major disruption to food supplies well before temperatures rise by the 1.5°C target, the president of the UN’s desertification conference said, as the effects of a climate crisis combined with water scarcity and poor farming practices threaten global agriculture.
Alain-Richard Donwahi, a former Ivory Coast defense minister who led last year’s UN COP15 summit on desertification, said that the effects of drought were taking hold more rapidly than expected.
“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going — I think it’s going even faster than we predicted,” he said. “Everyone is fixated on 1.5°C [above preindustrial levels], and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5°C.”
Photo: Reuters
The problems of rising temperatures, heat waves and more intense droughts and floods, were endangering food security in many regions, Donwahi said.
Look at “the effects of droughts on food security, the effects of droughts on migration of population, the effect of droughts on inflation. We could have an acceleration of negative effects, other than temperature,” he said.
Poor farming practices are not helping, he added.
“The degradation of soil comes with bad habits, and the way we do our agriculture will lead to degradation of the soil. When the soil is affected, the yield is affected,” he said.
Donwahi said the world could not afford to ignore desertification.
“We need to solve all the problems together. Desertification and drought leads to climate change, leads to loss of biodiversity. And when you have climate change you have droughts, floods, storms,” he said.
“It’s not only the poor countries, everybody is in the same boat [on food security]. Climate change, droughts, storms, floods don’t know any boundaries, they don’t need a visa to go into a country,” he added.
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