Health is a fundamental human right and a key indicator of sustainable development. The health of our land and ourselves are interconnected. We depend on healthy land to support our health, provide nutritious food, clean air and fresh water, reduce the spread of disease, and stabilize our climate.
The stark reality that up to 40% of the world's land is already degraded goes far beyond environmental concerns: we are putting our own lives at risk by compromising the health of our land.
Changes in land use and management have a wide range of consequences that affect human health and well-being, including climate change, food insecurity, and polluted air. Air pollution is the greatest environmental risk to human health, associated with millions of excess deaths worldwide, and is highly implicated in land use transformation. In 2019, outdoor air pollution caused 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide, 89% of which occurred in low- and middle-income countries.
Two billion tons of sand and dust enter the atmosphere every year. They often occur in ecologically fragile dryland areas where vegetation is sparse or non-existent, and sand and dust storms sweep in, damaging crops, killing livestock, and stripping away topsoil. They can carry atmospheric dust far beyond its source for thousands of kilometers, causing or worsening human health problems such as respiratory diseases and bacterial meningitis.
Desertification, land degradation and drought also remove the land's ability to store water, reducing water availability for agriculture, drinking, cooking and sanitation, and increasing the risk of food insecurity and infectious diseases. Few, if any, disasters claim more lives, cause more economic losses, and affect more sectors of society than droughts.
Preparing for a drought, rather than waiting until it happens, saves lives and livelihoods. Building resilience to drought has a variety of social and environmental co-benefits, including improved health outcomes. For example, improving early warning systems and weather forecasting could save 23,000 lives and up to US$2 billion each year in developing countries.
The close relationship between human health and land degradation has become even clearer in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is highly likely to have been caused by a process of wildlife-human conflict. expensive. As we transform more land and invade wildlife habitat, we open the door to new zoonotic diseases.
Future pandemics could cost the global economy US$2 trillion annually. For just 1% of that cost, protecting nature can prevent pandemics at the source and avoid the huge toll that land degradation has on our health.
The One Health approach considers the interrelationships between people, animals, plants, and the environment they share. It recognizes that the long-term resilience and well-being of humanity depends on the health and integrity of nature. One Health highlights land restoration as a clear path to preventing future pandemics and mitigating other disasters by repairing damaged ecosystems.
Sustainable land management lays a strong foundation for ensuring the health of the planet as well as our own, enabling current and future generations to thrive on land.
