Organized by the High Commissioner for Water and Forests and the Fight against
Desertification, the OSS Executive Board's meeting (March 28 to 29), was chaired by Tunisian Minister of Agriculture and Environment, Mokhtar Jellali.
He said the MOU "includes an article, calling on the Russian University to fight the
desertification phenomena and to limit its expansion, especially that the University possesses a broad experience in this regard."
In Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the regions most vulnerable to
desertification, severe droughts already lead to major food and health crises once every three decades or so on average; environmentalists and planners worry that human-induced warming and other factors will increase the frequency of such debilitating droughts and lead to even more problems with
desertification there.
Desertification, land degradation and drought have emerged as major environmental challenges especially in the developing countries like Pakistan.
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Desertification is creeping fast and our response needs to match the pace," Erian, who heads the center's Land Resources Studies Program, said in a recent interview.
Both these projects were the recipients of the 2009 Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy, but there are many more initiatives throughout Africa that are attempting to halt
desertification and loss of forests by providing efficient means to burn wood and charcoal and also more sustainable fuels.
It asks for a detailed examination of financing by existing instruments and the contribution of new financial resources for a more effective management of measures in the fight against
desertification. On a more procedural level, the EU stresses that an effective secretariat equipped with a "solid" budget is a prerequisite for the "healthy administrative and financial management" of the UNCCD.
Every year, an estimated $42 billion of economic loss and six million hectares of productive land is lost due to land degradation and
desertification by affecting overall agricultural productivity across the globe.
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Desertification is a worldwide problem directly affecting 250 million people and a third of the earth's land surface.
Mahmud Mohammed, spoke on Thursday at the 2019 commemoration of the World
Desertification Day in Nangere, Yobe.
Consequently,
desertification has been leading toward: water scarcity, food shortage, health issues, poverty and political instability.