The closing ceremony of COP15 highlighted the importance of restoring degraded lands in the fight against climate change.
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The 15th Conference of the parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification ended on Friday May 20 in Abidjan (Côte-d’Ivoire). In its final declaration, the participants pledged to “accelerate the restoration of one billion hectares of degraded land by 2030”. This commitment is part of a series of decisions taken after eleven days of work by COP15, which brought together some 7,000 participants.
Ibrahim Thiam, the executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, stressed the importance of restoring degraded lands in the fight against climate change. “If we restore land, we reduce emissions [de gaz à effet de serre] and we bring them back to the ground”he pointed out.
COP15 also committed to “building resilience to drought by identifying the expansion of drylands”to “combat sand and dust storms and other growing disaster risks” or even to “addressing forced migration and displacement caused by desertification and land degradation”.
COP15 opened on May 9 in the presence of nine African heads of state, who highlighted the negative effects of drought and desertification for their continent and “the emergency” to remedy it.
The host of the summit, the Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara, had thus underlined that the conference was being held “in a context of climate emergency which has a severe impact on our land management policies and exacerbates the phenomenon of drought”.
In a video message, French President Emmanuel Macron for his part estimated that “desertification has the face of more than 3.2 billion people who live on degraded lands, all over the world. There is an urgent need to act”.