United Nations Radio

Desertification

Experts meeting in Buenos Aires on Wednesday discussed the links between climate change, forests and desertification. The discussion was part of the ninth session of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) taking place in the Argentine capital this week. UN Radio's Jerome Longue is at the conference and spoke to Jan McAlpine, Director of the UN Forum on Forests, who says desertification and deforestation issues should be better reflected in the climate change treaty negotiations.

MCALPINE: The climate change convention is focused on carbon as a value, and billions of dollars are going into that issue and in the meantime many aspects of both desertified countries and heavily forested countries, or flow forced cover countries, are being ignored in that equation. We have a shared interest in making sure that the support both for development assistance but from philanthropic or private sector or other sources of funding is also paid attention to. Not necessarily in the convention but by donors, by the market, by the others. So, we have that common interest, and those are only a few our interests, but the desertification convention considers people and livelihoods for people-poverty, food security-these are all aspects which are really behind the concern about say soil quality. Again in forests, we have 1.6 billion people who depend on forests for their livelihoods, for how they live period. We have three hundred million people in the world who live only in forests, who are indigenous peoples who depend on forests. They don't take money; They don't care about anything else; They live in the forest. What happens if we make a decision just to throw up a fence around those forests, because we think they're valuable for carbon alone? We have just maybe lost those people, and we can't make those choices. We have to make balanced choices.

LONGUE: This morning, you were a moderator for this discussion from Buenos Aires to Copenhagen regarding the climate change negotiations. What was the main result of this roundtable?

MCALPINE: It deepened a lot of people's understanding of what the critical issues are and should be. It was somewhat untraditional in the way it was presented, compared to a usual convention. Conventions are much like some kind of a ritual dance, and for people who are unfamiliar with them they look very strange. This one at least has diverged somewhat and got into more of a discussion that was more focused on some aspects that were very useful. And out of that came: an increased understanding of what the future work of the UN CCD could be; where the priorities might be for the countries that are parties to the convention and who have concerns about desertification, so that they themselves will be starting to make these issues priorities. One of those, which I mentioned already, is soil, for example. Also, how do monitor and evaluate differences with soils, poverty, food security. There were many issues that came up, too many to count in many ways. But, the good news is that it really brought forward these issues in a way that was quite public. And now, both the Argentineans who are hosting this event and the Secretariat of the UN CCD convention will take on these presentations and talks, they will analyze them, and then they will present a work program that focuses on these priority areas.

LONGUE: Do you really think that with all the responsibility that the involvement is the same on the different continents?

MCALPINE: There were several speakers, today, this morning and maybe yesterday as well, who talked about the need to make the UN CCD a convention for the whole world, because desertification is not unique to say Africa. Africa is a very involved continent, and should be very much so in this convention. But in my own country of birth, the United States, we have huge deserts, the size of many countries in Europe or bigger. And, we too in the United States, for example, have a long history of struggling with water rights. I'm travelling tonight to Wyoming, which is a small state in the United States, where two hundred years ago their water rights to the rivers in their state were given away to farmers in other states. So even though the water runs right through their state, they don't have rights to the water. This is the very same issue that the UN CCD deals with. But, of course, the difference being that many member states that are quite active in the convention, don't have effective resources-financing-for helping to develop programmes. Developed countries like the United States or Canada, or whatever other country that has deserts, have been able to much more effectively figure out a system, perhaps not so much compensation but to work out the way forward. But at the same time, the science, the technical issues, the policy issues are the same worldwide. There is no difference between the issues facing an African country and deserts and the livelihoods of people, then there is if there is desertification-which there is-in the western part of the United States.

Producer: Jerome Longue, United Nations Radio
Duration: 4'59"