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Overgrazing by livestock can lead to land degradation. Land degradation is a process where land becomes less healthy and productive due to a combination of human activities or natural conditions. The causes for land degradation are numerous and complex. [1] Human activities are often the main cause, such as unsustainable land management practices.
Water and wind erosion are now the two primary causes of land degradation; combined, they are responsible for 84% of degraded acreage. [ 2 ] Each year, about 75 billion tons of soil is eroded from the land—a rate that is about 13–40 times as fast as the natural rate of erosion. [ 78 ]
Globally, the annual loss of 76 billion tons of soil costs the world about US$400 billion per year. In Canada, on-farm effects of land degradation were estimated to range from US$700 to US$915 million in 1984. The economic impact of land degradation is extremely severe in densely populated South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. [8]
Capillary action can result in an evaporative concentration of salts, causing land degradation through salination. Soil moisture measurement—measuring the water content of the soil, as can be expressed in terms of volume or weight—can be based on in situ probes (e.g., capacitance probes, neutron probes), or remote sensing methods. Soil ...
Human land development, in forms including agricultural and urban development, is considered a significant factor in erosion and sediment transport, which aggravate food insecurity. [70] In Taiwan, increases in sediment load in the northern, central, and southern regions of the island can be tracked with the timeline of development for each ...
According to Global Assessment of Land Degradation and Improvement (GLADA) a quarter of land area around the globe can now be marked as degraded. Land degradation is supposed to influence lives of 1.5 billion people and 15 billion tons of fertile soil is lost every year due to anthropogenic activities and climate change. [29]
Restoring the world's degraded land and holding back its deserts will require at least $2.6 trillion in investment by the end of the decade, the U.N. executive overseeing global talks on the issue ...
In total, one-third of the world's population lives in drylands where land degradation is reducing food supplies, biodiversity, water quality and soil fertility. [ 2 ] The bioreclamation of degraded lands (BDL) system was developed by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics ( ICRISAT ), with the aim of helping ...