ENVIRONMENT: World Mayors’ Meet To Combat Global Desertification

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Ramesh Jaura

BONN, Jun 8 1999 (IPS) - Global desertification is costing 4,200 million US dollars every year and, if left unchecked, might force countries world-wide to spend more and more of their scarce resources on humanitarian aid and disaster relief, according to the United Nations.

“The armed conflicts, disasters and environmental degradation caused by desertification are much more expensive in human and economic costs than they are to prevent,” warns a paper prepared for the World Forum of Mayors on Cities and Desertification to be held in Bonn on Jun 11 and 12.

In Latin America alone, 200 million hectares of land are now degraded and it is estimated that 1,300 million dollars would be needed just to halt this process in its tracks, adds the document, prepared by the Rome-based International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Secretariat of the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).

Cities are increasingly becoming recipients of desertification- induced migration as millions of landless farmers are driven to urban centres. This makes it incumbent on mayors to set up a network aimed at “internal sustainable development”, says Baerbel Dieckmann, the mayor of the city of Bonn and host to the forum.

Mayors of nearly 100 cities around the world will discuss ways and means of international cooperation. The meeting is being organised by the citiy of Bonn in cooperation with UNCCD, IFAD and Rome (whose mayor, Francesco Rutelli, hosted the first forum in October 1997).

The Rome gathering was a parallel event to the First Conference of Parties to the Convention to Combat Desertification, which resulted in the Declaration of Rome on Cities and Desertification.

The declaration highlighted the cities’ potential role in combating desertification and urged a deeper and more official involvement in activities dealing with the implementation of the Convention.

Conference sources said the Bonn forum would review the progress made since the Rome meeting in several actions areas. These include the pledge to liaise with national and local authorities to seek an integrated response to desertification within the framework of national action programmes.

The mayors, to be joined by independent experts, representatives of non governmental organisations and United Nations agencies, including the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), would take stock of steps taken to implement the pledge, conference sources said.

At the first forum in Rome the mayors also agreed to review municipal codes with a view to encouraging natural resource conservation practices in areas such as water management, energy and building construction.

“We would like the Bonn forum to set up an informal inter-city network to combat desertification and to promote and facilitate capacity building,” said Dieckmann, the mayor of Bonn.

Now known as the Bundesstadt (federal city), well ahead of the government and a majority of ministries moving to Berlin by September, Bonn has been preparing itself for a new role, that of a “centre for international cooperation” (CIC) where global and national actors in the field of sustainable development would interact.

The framework for performing such a role is provided by Bonn having become a U.N. city hosting several United Nations organisations such as the United Nations Volunteers (UNV), the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UNCCD.

In fact, a fortnight-long meeting on climate change will conclude on Jun 11, the day the world forum of mayors takes up the issue of desertification. Next October, the city of Bonn will provide the venue for a conference of parties to the climate change convention.

An eminent issue confronting the climate change convention is that of global warming. This phenomenon, says the UNCCD executive secretary Hama Arba Diallo, is closely related to desertification.

“Desertification not only exacerbates global warming and loss of biodiversity, it also promotes political instability in many countries,” warns Diallo, a diplomat who hails from Burkina Faso.

Contrary to popular belief, desertification is confined neither to regions bordering natural deserts nor to developing countries, he adds. Pockets of degraded drylands are appearing all over the world – in both Europe and the United States.

In fact, according to the UNEP’s World Desertification Atlas, 70 percent of the world’s agriculturally-used drylands, representing more than one quarter of the world’s land area, had been degraded by 1997.

The background paper prepared by the UNCCD and the Rome-based IFAD for the world forum of mayors challenges the widespread belief that desertification affects or is caused mainly by the poor.

However, the fact, it states, is that poverty stricken people comprise the group that is perhaps most vulnerable to the effects of dryland degradation. “Roughly 65 percent of the world’s poor and food-insecure people live in dryland and mountainous areas,” says the paper.