My Eco Talk Six

How to Green World’s Deserts and Reverse Climate Change

Allan Savory takes us through how we can turn the world’s deserts green and reverse climate change.

The most massive tsunami, a perfect storm, is bearing down upon us. And this is the result of a rising population of 10 Billion people, land turning to desert and climate change.

And there is no question to this all, but replacing fossil fuels, coal, gas with technology which are causing climate change. Desertification is a fancy world to lands that are turning to deserts.

We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year and those with months of humidity and months of dryness, where desertification is occurring. Fortunately, with space technology, we can look at these environments. About two-thirds of the world is desertifying.

For instance, in the Tihamah Desert, 25 mm of rainwater was falling. And the next day, the land was pure dry. So, where did the water go?

Some of the water runoff is flooding. But most of the water was soaked into the soil and evaporated again. Because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, carbon leaves the ground and goes back to the atmosphere.

While desertification is known to occur in arid and semi-arid areas, sometimes uncovered soil in high rainfall areas leads to increased evaporation and run-off-the cancer of desertification we don’t recognize. While we know that desertification is caused by livestock overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane.

While Allan grew up hating livestock for the damage they were creating and loving wildlife in Africa, this belief changed while studying ecology in university. As a biology student in Africa, national parks’ lands deteriorated during his young years. He researched and decided to reduce the number of elephants to a level that land could sustain. In the following years, they shot 40,000 elephants to stop the damage, but the situation never got better.

And since Allan loved elephants, it affected him and made him be determined to devote his life to finding solutions.

Coming to the US, he found out that national parks were changing like in Africa, and scientists had no answer- it’s natural and arid. So he decided to start research, and he looked at a land that had no livestock, which has desertified ten years later, for no reason.

We have never understood what is truly causing desertification, causing many civilizations and threatening us globally. The seasonal humility environments, the soil, and the vegetation, developed with the grazing of large numbers of animals.

Plant cover like grass decays biologically. If it doesn’t, it decays through oxidation, a slow process that leads to woody vegetation and bare soil, leading to carbon emission. Another way is through fires, but fires leave the land bare, releasing carbon. Burning 1 hectare of land gives off more damaging pollutants than 6,000 cars.

To keep most of the world’s lands healthy and reducing plants numbers is not a choice. So what are we going to do?

Only option. Use livestock, bunched and moving as a proxy for former herds and predators and mimic nature through the holistic management and plant grazing as Allan has done in Zimbabwe and Mexico.