Every June 17, the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought is celebrated, established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1995 with the aim of promoting the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and informing and raising awareness of international initiatives to combat these phenomena. This date helps us to remember that land degradation can be neutralized by finding solutions.

This year, under the slogan “Restoration. Lands. Recovery”, focuses on the transformation of degraded lands into healthy lands. Restoring degraded lands contributes to economic resilience, job creation, increased incomes and increased food security. It also helps to recover biodiversity; it allows the capture of atmospheric carbon that warms the Earth, thus reducing the effect of climate change; and supports a green recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, as the restoration of natural landscapes reduces direct contact between wildlife and human settlements, creating a natural barrier against zoonoses.

Preventing, slowing and reversing the loss of productive land and natural ecosystems is urgent now to ensure the long-term survival of people and the planet. In this context, more than a hundred countries, on the occasion of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, have completed the restoration of nearly 800 million hectares in the next 10 years.

If we restore degraded lands, we can achieve enormous benefits for people and the planet. For this reason, from the Biodiversity Foundation, aware of the importance of restoration to fight against desertification and drought, we have supported, through our calls for aid, more than 25 projects to tackle these phenomena, allocating nearly 2 million euros for this purpose.

Thus, for example, the Global Nature Foundation (FGN) is working on a wetland management and restoration project, where it aims to improve the state of 10 wetlands in the Iberian Peninsula so that hydraulic and vegetation management actions serve as carbon sinks. It develops habitat management and management actions, awareness-raising, study and dissemination of the importance of these ecosystems, which well managed are an ally in the fight against climate change. The FGN is also developing a project that aims to increase the resilience of southern European forests to climate change, through adaptive forest management, which will allow shocks such as fires, increased pests, droughts, etc. to be faced.

Another case is the MASBIO project carried out by the BC3 (Basque Centre for Climate Change) and addresses the problems of rural areas in the Mediterranean river basins, which face the enormous environmental challenges of managing and responding to water scarcity, reducing erosion and conserving their abundant biodiversity. This initiative seeks to propose sustainable land management actions at the watershed level, developing actions that generate synergies between the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and the biosphere.

Finally, BC3 also develops RESH2O (Restoration of environmental services and the water cycle in a context of adaptation to climate change in Mediterranean Basins), which aims to identify the key elements for the articulation of comprehensive forest restoration plans that increase resilience to climate change while promoting a recovery of the water cycle.