COP16 will take place in Riyadh to mark 30th anniversary of UNCCD

The sixteenth session of Conference of the Parties (COP16) of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from 2 to 13 December 2024.

The event will be held to marks the 30th anniversary of the UNCCD, with overarching theme “Our land, our future”.

“COP16 is set to become a landmark event for accelerating action on land restoration, drought resilience and green transition” said UNCCD in a statement.

The conference assumed importance as the Desertification, land degradation, and drought are among the most pressing environmental challenges of our time, with up to 40% of all land area worldwide already considered degraded.

According to UNCCD, every second, an equivalent of four football fields of healthy land becomes degraded, adding up to a total of 100 million hectares each year.

The agency says 100 million hectares of productive land are degraded each year. Droughts are becoming more common, and three-quarters of people are expected to face water scarcity by 2050.

Currently, around 2 billion people live in drylands, which are most prone to desertification, according to Earth.org.

In Africa, some 40 million people are living in severe drought conditions already, according to the World Economic Forum report Quantifying the Impact of Climate Change on Human Health 2024.

The UN Convention to Combat Desertification’s 2022 report Droughts in Numbers finds that the African continent has been the most impacted by droughts in the past century, with over 300 episodes and bearing an important death and economic toll around the world.

Projections indicate that by 2050, droughts may affect over three-quarters of the world’s population, and an estimated 4.8-5.7 billion people will live in areas that are water-scarce for at least one month each year, up from 3.6 billion today.

Up to 216 million people could be forced to migrate by 2050, largely due to drought in combination with other factors including water scarcity, declining crop productivity, sea-level rise, and overpopulation.