COP15 against desertification, which ended on Friday in Abidjan, pledged to ‘accelerate the restoration of one billion hectares of degraded land by 2030’, the final declaration said. There is an urgent need to act, reminded the participants.
This commitment is part of a series of decisions taken after eleven days of work by the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which brought together some 7,000 participants.
In addition to the commitment on degraded lands in which the ‘involvement of women’ is highlighted, COP15 also commits to ‘strengthening resilience to drought by identifying the expansion of drylands’, to ‘combat sand and dust storms and other growing disaster risks’ or to ‘address forced migration and displacement caused by desertification and land degradation’.
Ibrahim Thiam, UNCCD Executive Secretary, highlighted the importance of restoring degraded lands in the fight against climate change. ‘If you restore land, you reduce emissions [de CO2] and we bring them back into the ground,” he said during one of the closing press conferences.
Not irreversible
Alain Richard Donwahi, the new president of COP15, is committed to ‘accelerating the implementation of the decisions taken’, because ‘there is an obligation of results’ on the part of all the stakeholders.
The Ivorian Prime Minister, Patrick Achi, for his part invited during the closing ceremony ‘all the parties to demonstrate efficiency and speed in the implementation of the projects already identified and those which will emerge tomorrow’.
COP15 in Abidjan on desertification opened on May 9 in the presence of nine African heads of state, who highlighted the negative effects of drought and desertification for their continent and the “urgency” of ‘remediate.
In a video message, French President Emmanuel Macron estimated that “desertification has the face of more than 3.2 billion people who live on degraded lands, all over the world. It is urgent to act.
‘Desertification and land degradation are not inevitable. These crises are not irreversible and solutions exist,’ he added.
/ATS