Our ruined planet: land decay to unleash mass migration, global study warns

Land degradation will unleash a mass migration of at least 50 million people by 2050, and many as 700 million unless humans stop depleting the life-giving resource, more than 100 scientists warned Monday.

Already, land decay caused by unsustainable farming, mining, pollution, and city expansion is undermining the well-being of some 3.2 billion people – 40 per cent of the global population, they said in the first comprehensive assessment of land health.

Land depletion threatens food security for all Earth’s citizens, and access to clean water and breathable air regulated by the soil and the plants that grow on it.

The condition of land is “critical,” alerted the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

“We’ve converted large amounts of our forests, we’ve converted large amounts of our grasslands, we’ve lost 87 per cent of our wetlands … we’ve really changed our land surface in the last several hundred years,” IPBES chairman Robert Watson said.

“Land degradation, loss of productivity of those soils and those vegetations will force people to move. It will be no longer viable to live on those lands,” he said.