Climate Change and Land: An IPCC special report on climate change, desertification, land degradation, sustainable land management, food security, and greenhouse gas fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems

On August 7, 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published Climate Change and Land, a special report that addresses greenhouse gas emissions and their link to desertification, land degradation and food security. The IPCC was set up by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization in 1988. This report is the culmination of two years of work by 107 experts from 52 countries. The report will be a key scientific input at the Conference of the Parties of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (COP14) in New Delhi in September 2019. Global population growth and changes in per capita consumption, the report notes, have caused “unprecedented rates of land and freshwater use,” and climate change has exacerbated this land degradation. The report projects a decrease in the stability of food supply “as the magnitude and frequency of extreme weather events that disrupt food chains increases.” The report considers land-based measures that can help mitigate climate change, such as reforestation, afforestation, reduced deforestation, and the use of bioenergy crops. However, it says that these measures have certain limits, and the widespread use of bioenergy crops, for instance, could increase risks of desertification, land degradation, food security and sustainable development. Land must remain productive to maintain food security as the world’s population increases the report asserts. And it concludes that there must be rapid reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions across all sectors in order to reduce the negative impacts of climate change on land ecosystems and food systems.