The Earth’s crust is cracking at an unprecedented rate under the combined impact of the climate crisis and human overexploitation. According to the most recent alerts from the United Nations, desertification and drought have ceased to be threats in the future and have become a structural crisis of the present. Today, 37% of the planet’s surface is already degradedan alarming percentage that puts the food security and survival of more than 3 billion people on a global scale in check. “We are not facing a specific problem of lack of rain, but rather a degradation process that drains the soil of life and reduces its ability to recover,” warns the climatologist at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Elena Vancea.
Environmental and economic urgency
The emergency is not only environmental. It also has a growing economic bill. Every year, Land degradation costs around $878 billionand water scarcity has caused almost half of global agricultural losses in three decades, destroying rural incomes and destabilizing global food security. As the environmental economist, specialized in water resources, summarizes, Marcus Goldstein, “Desertification is no longer just an ecological tragedy; “It is also a factor of global economic pressure, with direct effects on food production and the stability of markets.”
The warning is repeated on different fronts. Scientists, economists and negotiators describe desertification as a crisis that already affects soil fertilityin the price of food, in the stability of rural economies and in the risk of human displacement
The risk is no longer exclusive to developing countries. In southern Europe, countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are on the front line of the catastrophe. The climate in these areas is rapidly changing from temperate to dry, increasing the scarcity of drinking water to levels that the UN describes as “accumulated water bankruptcy.”
Spain, on the border
In this global panorama, Spain appears as one of the most vulnerable fronts of Europe. The pressure on the territory is perceived in the retreat of humidity, the loss of vegetation cover and the accelerated wear of soils punished for decades by intensive use, high temperatures and irregular rainfall. In the Mediterranean arc, the advance of the desert has long ceased to be a metaphor: it is measured on the ground.
The data of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition They draw a forceful diagnosis of this transformation. The degradation map offers one of the most severe images of the problem: 43.3% of the Spanish territory is at risk active, which is equivalent to more than 206,000 square kilometers of land classified as under severe desertification. In that context, Murcia embodies the most extreme case, with a 99.8% of its surface at risk critical. Around it, provinces such as Almería, Granada, Alicante and large areas of Castilla-La Mancha closely follow this same trend.
Experts also insist on an increasingly evident contradiction: the torrential rains that interrupt periods of drought do not rescue the land, but rather fall on dry, compact soils without vegetation, dragging away the fertile layer and accelerating erosion. “When rain comes torrentially on dry soil without vegetation, it does not rescue it, it accelerates its erosion,” warns Vancea.
The international response
Against this backdrop, climate diplomacy is preparing for a new test. between the August 23 and September 4, Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia, will host COP17 against desertification. The 197 member countries of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will arrive at the meeting with a very clear task of translating the diagnoses into concrete commitments. Urgent financing, the protection of grasslands, the reorganization of water management and compensation mechanisms to restore degraded lands are already among the central topics of the meeting.
As Sainbayar Bat-Erdene, advisor to the summit’s organizing committee, summarizes, “COP17 cannot limit itself to issuing statements. The pressure is now on to turn soil restoration and grassland protection into real obligations.”