Restoring land and stopping desertification anchor a new UNEP guide, which outlines seven practical actions spanning soil health, pollinators, farming, cities, freshwater, oceans, and finance.
Restoring land and stopping desertification start from a genuinely alarming baseline. More than 2 billion hectares of the world’s land is already degraded, affecting over 3 billion people. Roughly 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost to erosion in croplands every single year.
Desertification now touches 3.2 billion people across more than 168 countries. “Governments and businesses have a leading role to play in reversing the damage humanity has done to the Earth,” says Doreen Robinson, UNEP’s Ecosystems Division deputy director, “but everyday people also have a vital role to play.”
The seven actions UNEP outlines target distinct pressure points. Protecting soil health matters because roughly 60 percent of the world’s species live in soil, and it produces 95% of global food. Healthy soil also locks away enormous stores of carbon that erosion and tillage release back into the atmosphere. UNEP recommends zero-tillage farming, composting, and drip irrigation as concrete interventions available to farmers and even individual gardeners.
Protecting pollinators addresses a less obvious link to desertification. Three in four fruit- and seed-producing crops depend on pollinators, and losing bats, bees, and butterflies to habitat loss compounds land degradation by undermining the food systems that depend on healthy land in the first place.
Supporting the roughly 2 billion people, disproportionately rural and poor, who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, forms a third pillar. Sustainable farming practices only spread if they’re economically viable for the people expected to adopt them.
Restoring land and stopping desertification also increasingly run through cities, a genuinely underappreciated angle. By 2050, two-thirds of people will live in urban areas. Cities already consume 75% of the planet’s resources while generating over half its waste and at least 60% of its greenhouse gas emissions.
UNEP’s recommendations here, urban forests, preserved canals and ponds, roof and vertical gardens, treat urban design itself as a lever against the broader degradation cities indirectly drive through resource demand.
Freshwater ecosystems and oceans round out the ecological pillars. Both are disappearing rapidly through pollution, overextraction, and climate change, despite sustaining the water cycles that keep land fertile in the first place. UNEP points to the Freshwater Challenge as a concrete mechanism that countries can join to accelerate river and wetland restoration by 2030.
The UN Convention to Combat Desertification’s flagship target, land degradation neutrality by 2030, requires restoring 1.5 billion hectares globally. According to recent UNCCD reporting, that goal remains technically “within reach,” but only if countries dramatically accelerate their current commitments. UNCCD’s own chief scientist has acknowledged that global degradation trends are still moving in the wrong direction, even as 131 of 196 countries have pledged voluntary targets.
Restoring land and stopping desertification remain technically achievable by 2030, but only if countries sharply accelerate their commitments to restoring 1.5 billion hectares globally. Photo by Sebastian Kurpiel on Unsplash.
The seventh action on UNEP’s list, unlocking finance, is arguably the one that determines whether the other six can scale at all. Investments in nature-based solutions need to more than double, to $542 billion annually by 2030, to meet the world’s combined climate, biodiversity, and restoration goals.
Between 2016 and 2019, global donors contributed roughly $5 billion in total toward combating desertification, land degradation, and drought. That figure illustrates just how far current public finance falls short of what UNEP’s own numbers indicate restoration actually requires.
The UNCCD has acknowledged that public and philanthropic funding alone will never close this gap, which is why it has pushed for new financial instruments designed specifically to attract private capital. That effort remains in comparatively early stages relative to the scale of need.
What UNEP’s guide on restoring land and stopping desertification gets right is specificity. These are concrete, implementable actions rather than vague calls to “do better,” and pairing government-level policy shifts with individual actions like composting or moving a bank account gives people at every scale something tangible to act on.
What it doesn’t resolve is the persistent disconnect between voluntary national pledges and enforceable outcomes. 128 countries engaging with the Target Setting Programme represent genuine diplomatic momentum, but engagement with a voluntary framework is not the same as verified hectares restored.
Restoring land and stopping desertification, as UNEP frames it, is achievable in principle, and the guide’s seven actions reflect genuine, evidence-based intervention points. Whether they add up to reversing a 2-billion-hectare degradation problem by 2030 depends less on the list itself than on whether the financing gap underlying every item on it actually closes in the next four years, something no publication guide can accomplish on its own.
