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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.
This reduces the food security, which many countries facing soil degradation already do not have. [8] Slight degradation refers to land where yield potential has been reduced by 10%, moderate degradation refers to a yield decrease of 10–50%. Severely degraded soils have lost more than 50% of their potential.
Wind erosion is a major geomorphological force, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. It is also a major source of land degradation, evaporation, desertification, harmful airborne dust, and crop damage—especially after being increased far above natural rates by human activities such as deforestation, urbanization, and agriculture. [22] [23]
One major component of environmental degradation is the depletion of the resource of fresh water on Earth. [23] Approximately only 2.5% of all of the water on Earth is fresh water , with the rest being salt water . 69% of fresh water is frozen in ice caps located on Antarctica and Greenland , so only 30% of the 2.5% of fresh water is available ...
A quarter of all the animal species live underground. According to the 2020 Food and Agriculture Organization’s report "State of knowledge of soil biodiversity – Status, challenges and potentialities", there are major gaps in knowledge about biodiversity in soils. [18] [19] Degraded soil requires synthetic fertilizer to produce high yields ...
Desertification is a gradual process of increased soil aridity.Desertification has been defined in the text of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) as "land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities."
Land loss is the term typically used to refer to the conversion of coastal land to open water by natural processes and human activities. The term land loss includes coastal erosion . It is a much broader term than coastal erosion because land loss also includes land converted to open water around the edges of estuaries and interior bays and ...
Grassland in Europe. Grassland degradation, also called vegetation or steppe degradation, is a biotic disturbance in which grass struggles to grow or can no longer exist on a piece of land due to causes such as overgrazing, burrowing of small mammals, and climate change. [1]