A new image has been taken of the whole Earth 50 years after the first - revealing noticeable changes to its surface.
Portugal has seen little rain since October 2021. By the end of January, 45 per cent of the country was enduring ‘severe’ or ‘extreme’ drought conditions.
(AP Photo/Sergio Azenha)
If the world overshoots its climate targets, drought could cause dryland areas to expand by a quarter and encompass half the Earth’s land area, threatening lives and livelihoods.
Lars Laestadius, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences; Chris Reij, World Resources Institute, and Dennis Garrity, Center for International Forestry Research – World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF)
Africa’s Great Green Wall must immediately speed up to meet the needs of people along the edges of the Sahara Desert.
Farmers working the land in the Western Sahara, Egypt.
DeAgostini/Getty Images
Anja Gassner, Center for International Forestry Research – World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF); Philip Dobie, Center for International Forestry Research – World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), and Robert Nasi, Centre for International Forestry Research
A changing climate threatens the balance that communities in drylands have created.
Plants take carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, but it goes straight back when they die or are harvested. There is an important difference between carbon fluxes and actual carbon sequestration.
Coffee bushes in a shade-grown plantation in the Andes, Ecuador.
Morley Read/Shutterstock
A new international report makes for bleak reading on the state of the world’s soils. It predicts that land degradation will displace up to 700 million people worldwide by mid-century.
By the end of the 1990s, the idea of encroaching deserts had become difficult to defend.
IFRC/Flickr
Board Chair, Global EverGreening Alliance & Distinguished Senior Fellow, World Agroforestry (ICRAF), Center for International Forestry Research – World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF)