Land decay to displace tens of millions by 2050

Land degradation will unleash a mass migration of at least 50 million people by 2050 -- as many as 700 million unless humans stop depleting the life-giving resource, dozens of scientists warned yesterday.

Already, land decay caused by unsustainable farming, mining, pollution, and city expansion is undermining the well-being of some 3.2 billion people -- 40 percent of the global population, they said in the first comprehensive assessment of land health.

The condition of land is "critical," said the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

"We've converted large amounts of our forests, we've converted large amounts of our grasslands, we've lost 87 percent of our wetlands... we've really changed our land surface in the last several hundred years," IPBES chairman Robert Watson said of the findings.

"The message is: land degradation, loss of productivity of those soils and those vegetations will force people to move. It will be no longer viable to live on those lands," he told AFP.

"Between now and 2050, we estimate the number could be 50 (million) to some 700 million people."

The lowest number is a best-case-scenario projection, said Watson.

The main drivers of land degradation, said the report, were "high-consumption lifestyles" in rich countries, and rising demand for products in developing ones, fueled by income and population growth. The problem of land decay does not only impact the people who live on it, the assessment underlined.