The negative consequences of human actions have brought our world and our future to a dangerous crossroads: will we be able to avert the worst impacts of climate change? How can we stop and reverse the loss of fertile soil, biodiversity, and other natural capital that supplies all our food and other basic needs? Where are the jobs for millions of unemployed young people?

The support plan for the Sahel is a regional approach to collectively address the root causes of disruptions such as poverty, migration and youth unemployment, climate change, insecurity, governance and institutional issues in the region. In this report an overview of the current situation for each of the priority areas of the UN Support Plan is presented to demonstrate that the full implementation of the plan could utilize an existing momentum of development not seen in decades in the Sahel.

Life on Earth depends on healthy soils. The soil under our feet is a living system – home to many fascinating plants and animals, whose invisible interactions ensure our well-being and that of the planet. Soils provide us with nutritious food and other products as well as with clean water and flourishing habitats for biodiversity. At the same time, soils can help slow the onset of climate change and make us more resilient to extreme climate events such as droughts and floods. Soils preserve our cultural heritage and are a key part of the landscapes that we all cherish.

According to the U.N. and World Bank, 40 percent of the global population is affected by water scarcity, and by 2030, up to 700 million people could be displaced as a result.
Having spent his youth spent living through a series of droughts and famine, Ibrahim Thiaw is not only a face to these numbers but also on a mission, as Executive Secretary of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), to ensure that even if the statistics are forgotten, the lands and lives they involve are not.

Between 1981 and 2003, nearly a quarter of global land got degraded, says UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the nature and scope of the linkages between the resource environments, livelihoods and food security of households and individuals. These are analyzed using the livelihood systems framework with the biophysical environment as the entry point. The biophysical and socio-economic environments are investigated as the conditioning and influencing factors that help define the relationships along the production-consumption continuum. The context is spatial, in this case that of fragile areas, where most of the poor and food insecure live and work.

Dust storms are capable of transporting sediment over thousands of kilometers, but due to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s proximity to the Sahara Desert, the region is one of the dustiest in the world. While natural sources such as the Sahara are the main contributors to dust storms in MENA, land-use changes and human-induced climate change has added anthropogenic sources as well.

In a world in which poverty is increasingly concentrated in vulnerable or fragile states, and fragility is increasingly driven by climate change, climate-induced displacement has become one of the most visible manifestations of the relationship between ecological and societal breakdown. Newest figures from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reveal that over 70% of the 33 million newly displaced people (2019) had climate-related triggers.

Vast swathes of land, from Africa to the Middle East, are being left useless by climate shifts and human pressures such as deforestation, mining and farming, threatening to hike migration and conflict. The accelerating damage could cost the global economy a staggering $23 trillion by 2050 - and rich countries as well as poor will pay the price.

Interview with Ibrahim Thiaw