Friday, February 7, 2025

Land degradation neutrality is a unique opportunity to restore degraded land

In Botswana, like in much of the rest of the world, land degradation is extensively undermining efforts to reach sustainable development goals (SDGs) which are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. According to the United Nations (UN), “SDGs address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change and environmental degradation.” Land degradation is the reduction or loss of economic productivity or value of land which is caused by a combination of human-induced processes acting upon the land, driving the loss of biodiversity and accelerating climate change. 

The most obvious drivers of land degradation in Botswana are population growth and economic development as well as over-extraction of natural resources. This has had multiple effects mainly the reduction in the provision of ecosystem services which has resulted in food insecurity, declining soil fertility and social and economic costs. 

Speaking to The Telegraph, Environmentalist and Geologist, Matshidiso Ganetsang explained that if we lose land productivity it means we degrade the livelihoods of the people that live off that land. “Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15, life on Land, and its target 15.3 on Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) is a unique opportunity for Botswana to curtail the budding threats of land degradation and to reap numerous socio-economic benefits of LDN,” she says. 

Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN) is defined by the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as: “A state whereby the amount and quality of land resources, necessary to support ecosystem functions and services and enhance food security, remains stable or increases within specified temporal and spatial scales and ecosystems.”

Ganetsang says LDN offsets the expected loss of productive land in Botswana with the recovery of degraded areas. “In other words it conserves, sustainably manages and restores land in the context of land use planning,” she says, adding that “over the years declining soil quality has resulted in poor crop performance and high risk of crop failure.”

Botswana hasn’t had any substantial investments in sustainable land management, perhaps due to unclear land governance. 

A number of attempts have been made in recent decades to map the extent of land degradation in Botswana to generate a national overview. However, such high-level assessments face constraints due to challenges of interpreting data in climatically and ecologically distinct regions.  As a result a wide range of estimates of land degradation in Botswana show that 91, 000km2 or 15.5% of Botswana is affected by land degradation or desertification. Furthermore, the annual cost of land degradation in Botswana is estimated at P3.5 billion.

The International Economics of Land Degradation (ELD) initiative which is dedicated to demonstrating that it pays off to invest in sustainable land management says the damage that the loss of fertile land brings is estimated in the billions annually. While they admit that there are methods that can be used to fix the quality of degraded soil, they also say “these methods are expensive as compared to protecting the land in the first place.”

According to the United Nations (UN), achieving Land Degradation Neutrality requires multi-stakeholder engagement and planning across various sectors, supported by national-scale coordination that utilises existing local and regional governance structures.

Seeing the urgency of this matter, the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism (MENT) through the Department of Forestry and Range Resources (DFRR) launched a project on September 22, 2019 to embark on restoration of degraded land and soil in order to achieve land degradation-neutrality (LDN). The project amongst other things encompasses land degradation assessment and mapping, land degradation monitoring system establishment, land restoration strategy Development and setting of land degradation neutrality.

Speaking at the launch, the Minister of Environment, Natural Resources Conservation and Tourism, Philda Kereng admitted to the declining agricultural and rangeland productivity in Botswana. “If not controlled it will lead to the deterioration of biodiversity and food security in the country,” said Kereng.

Fighting land degradation is an investment on its own. For every P10 invested in land management, we get P50 from harvest of water yields. This means it is cheaper to combat land degradation at an early stage than trying to fix the resulting damages later.

A researcher who spoke to this publication, Oaitse Malesu, says the innovative feature of LDN which sets it apart from preceding efforts to address land degradation globally is the adoption of neutrality as the goal. Malesu also says the adoption of LDN facilitates sustainable development in different ways. 

 “The reason why the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) considers LDN as an “SDG Accelerator” is because it is interlinked with several other SDGs such as poverty eradication (SDG 1), food security (SDG2 2), water (SDG 6), and climate change (SDG 13),” says Malesu.

At its core, LDN entails better land management practices and improved land use planning that will improve economic, social and ecological sustainability for Batswana.

Botswana has used the Integrated Landscape Management (ILM) for scaling-up sustainable land management. ILM is critical in supporting Botswana’s efforts towards achieving LDN. By taking a landscape approach, Botswana supports the creation of an enabling environment and development of necessary capacities for integrating sustainable land management and restoration into land use planning processes. This includes, amongst other things, the development of tools for integrating the value of ecosystems and biodiversity into land use planning and decision making, and development of sector-specific standards, safeguards and incentives to protect ecosystem health and promote a landscape approach to managing and utilising natural resources.

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