@article{Le:177961,
      recid = {177961},
      author = {Le, Quang Bao and Nkonya, Ephraim and Mirzabaev, Alisher},
      title = {Biomass Productivity-Based Mapping of Global Land  Degradation Hotspots},
      address = {2014-07},
      number = {1546-2016-132249},
      series = {Discussion Papers},
      pages = {57},
      year = {2014},
      abstract = {Land degradation is a global problem affecting negatively  the livelihoods and food security of billions of people,  especially farmers and pastoralists in the developing  countries. Eradicating extreme poverty without adequately  addressing land degradation is highly unlikely. Given the  importance and magnitude of the problem, there have been  recurring efforts by the international community to  identify the extent and severity of land degradation in  global scale. As discussed in this paper, many previous  studies were challenged by lack of appropriate data or  shortcomings of their methodological approaches. In this  paper, using global level remotely sensed vegetation index  data, we identify the hotspots of land degradation in the  world across major land cover types. In doing so, we use  the long-term trend of inter-annual vegetation index as an  indicator of biomass production decline or improvement.  Besides the elimination of technical factors, confounding  the relationship between the indicator and the biomass  production of the land, we apply a methodology which  accounts for masking effects of both inter-annual rainfall  variation and atmospheric fertilization. We also delineate  the areas where chemical fertilization could be hiding the  inherent land degradation processes.
Our findings show that  land degradation hotpots cover about 29% of global land  area and are happening in all agro-ecologies and land cover  types. Land degradation is especially massive in  grasslands. About 3.2 billion people reside in these  degrading areas. However, the number of people affected by  land degradation is likely to be higher as more people  depend on the continuous flow of ecosystem goods and  services from these affected areas. As we note in the  paper, this figure, although, does not include all possible  areas with degraded lands, it identifies those areas where  land degradation is most acute and requires priority  actions in both in-depth research and management measures  to combat land degradation. Our findings indicate that, in  fact, land improvement has also occurred in about 2.7% of  global land area during the last three decades, providing a  support that with appropriate actions land degradation  trend could be reversed, and that the efforts to address  land degradation need to be substantially increased, at  least by a factor, to attain the vision of Zero Net Land  Degradation. We also identify concrete aspects in which  these results should be interpreted with caution, the  limitations of this work and the key areas for future  research.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/177961},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.22004/ag.econ.177961},
}