More Than 75 Percent of Earth's Land Areas Are 'Broken,' Major Report Finds (vice.com) 145
Like a broken cell phone that can only text or take pictures, but not make a single call, more than 75 percent of the Earth's land areas have lost some or most of their functions, undermining the well-being of the 3.2 billion people that rely on them to produce food crops, provide clean water, control flooding and more. From a report: These once-productive lands have either become deserts, are polluted, or have been deforested and converted for unsustainable agricultural production. This is a major contributor to increased conflict and mass human migration, and left unchecked, could force as many as 700 million to migrate by 2050, according to the world's first comprehensive evidence-based assessment of land degradation, released today in MedellÃn, Colombia.
Land degradation -- including deforestation, soil erosion, and salinity and pollution of fresh water systems -- is also driving species to extinction and aggravating the effects of climate change, the report concludes. It was written by more than 100 leading experts from 45 countries for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES is the 'IPCC for biodiversity,' a scientific assessment of the status of non-human life that makes up the Earth's life support system.
Land degradation -- including deforestation, soil erosion, and salinity and pollution of fresh water systems -- is also driving species to extinction and aggravating the effects of climate change, the report concludes. It was written by more than 100 leading experts from 45 countries for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). IPBES is the 'IPCC for biodiversity,' a scientific assessment of the status of non-human life that makes up the Earth's life support system.
Oh for fuck's sake (Score:2, Insightful)
Can we please stop saying that anything that has any type of problem is "broken?"
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Car Analogy for /. (Score:2)
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Re:Oh for fuck's sake (Score:4, Informative)
Well, if the land is no longer capable of supporting plants and animals, it is broken; it doesn't work; doesn't perform its desired function.
Sometimes it can be fixed. Other times not so much.
Re:Oh for fuck's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
Most of the world's farmland is so "broken" that the problem in most countries is people getting fat. This now includes such historically poor places as South Korea, China and growing swaths of India. The areas that are actually in trouble are for the most part where farmers are being massacred by whatever latest tribe of bloodthirsty savages happens to be radiating from the Middle East this year. Al Shabab and Boko Haram are not environmental problems.
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Most of the world's farmland is so "broken" that the problem in most countries is people getting fat.
Modern farming practices have in fact reduced biodiversity for decades, and have in many cases impoverished the land of organic materials. It is stupid to try to brush this aside as irrelevant, since much if not most of our food production ultimately relies on a healthy ecology. Farmers use an enormous - and rising - amount of pesticides, artificial fertilisers etc etc, so you would expect that they gain an huge plus from doing this, right? In fact, compared to organic farmers, they only produce 20% more -
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Most of the world's farmland is so "broken" that the problem in most countries is people getting fat.
Obesity has very little to do with how much farming we produce. Hell if we had more farm and people ate more products from said farms we may not be so fat. And I appreciate the irony of saying this while chowing down on some deep fried processed shit for lunch.
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Statistics like the one in story are just bullshit pushing a political agenda
A "political agenda" sujests a contentious idea. Do you find the idea of being able to sustain a modern civilisation offensive to your own peculiar ideology?
Re:Oh for fuck's sake (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Oh for fuck's sake (Score:2)
Oh, its worse than that. (Score:1, Informative)
Its worse than that.
They are classifying ANYTHING as broken.
They classify natural deserts as broken.
They classify natural mountains as broken
They classify ALL human farming (no matter how productive for how long) as broken.
As far as I can tell, its pretty much only natural untouched forests and jungle they consider to be not broken.
Interesting worldview, that..
Someone got a bit caught up in trying to rationalise a stupid-high number.
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They classify natural deserts as broken.
They classify natural mountains as broken
Your reading comprehension is poor... they list those making up much of the area NOT "broken". From TFA:
The only places left relatively unaffected will be polar regions and tundra, high mountains, and deserts, the report projects.
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COUGH* Fake account *COUGH
This seems highly unlikely, and sensationalistic (Score:5, Informative)
There is no way you can really claim 75% of the Earth's land mass is "broken". That is insane, it would imply the world was starving and farms everywhere were no longer viable.
I'm imagining they reached this conclusion after declaring any bit of land they could find a candy wrapper or wandering plastic bag as "polluted".
But then it is the "IPCC for biodiversity", so that really says it all as far as how much stock you can place in the report.
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This type of fear-mongering is not helping anyone out. Too much wolf crying, and people won't believe, nor care, when something that actually has an impact is happening. Had we had this much noise back in the '80s, nobody would have bothered banning CFCs, just because people would consider the ozone hole as something that was something impossible to do anything about.
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Wow, none of you actually read the underlying report.
Re:This seems highly unlikely, and sensationalisti (Score:5, Insightful)
It's clear on the face of it that the underlying report can'tr possible support the headline/summary of the report.
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nothing short of politically motivated sensationalism
No, you're making this political. The sensationalism is about getting clicks and money, not about politics.
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Why can't it be about both? There's nothing more satisfying than padding your wallet and ego simultaneously.
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Of course not, because if they did that they might actually learn something.
Free LifeHack (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a hint for a happier life: Don't read anything where the summary screams "bullshit".
Why would I bother to read anything based on an obvious lie like "75% of land is broken".
Now if someone somewhere wrote a better summary that actually made some sense, then I might be tempted to read the report. But as things stand I can be pretty sure (A) that will not happen and (B) the original report is very likely a complete waste of time (mine and theirs).
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No they haven't, because the freakin' thing hasn't been released yet (source, about halfway down [ipbes.net]). All that's come out is a media release summary. If you put out a media release without the accompanying scientific report to support it, it's probably bullshit you don't want people to be able to call you out on.
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That got flushed out in February of last year.
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The article says that 75% of the land has lost at least one of its functions.
No, the report doesn't even say that. It says...
Less than 25% of the Earth’s land surface has escaped substantial impacts of human activity.
The metric they are using is biodiversity and the assessment technique they are using estimates that most of the forcing function for a reduction in bio-diversity is human related climate change since the beginning of human existance (not actually direct human intervention) which is how they can presume impact for areas where humans have never visited (and get to 75%-90%)....
Consequently, if your metric is not biodiversity, or if your threshold is not "escape
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"Oh dear! 75% of the land surface isn't actually arable, or even habitable. Humans must have ruined it!"
I note that people who make these broad proclamations *never* have any sense of the scale of the planet. They see a hobby farm and think that's all of agriculture.
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https://www.ipbes.net/news/med... [ipbes.net]
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Neither 75% nor "broken" appears in the media release
It says
"Media Release: Worsening Worldwide Land Degradation Now ‘Critical’, Undermining Well-Being of 3.2 Billion People"
"Less than 25% of the Earth’s land surface has escaped substantial impacts of human activity – and by 2050, the IPBES experts estimate this will have fallen to less than 10%"
That's not remotely the same as what the Slashdot headline says
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And cultures that desire only a male heir?
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If your for a 'woman's right to choose', your for a 'woman's right to choose'. Too bad you don't like her reasons.
Re: If people would STOP HAVING BABIES... (Score:2)
It's you're you pillock!
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What? 'Your' is the word that makes you mad...I'm doing it right.
Re: If people would STOP HAVING BABIES... (Score:2)
Doing what right? Showing you're a bit thick?
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"you are bigotry attacks the poor"?
Where did you learn English? Especially contractions?
They stopped a while ago (Score:2)
Japan, and much of Europe is already pretty much not having babies enough to replace the aging population - that is a large part of why some countries there are attempting to accept a lot of refugees.
The more advanced a country is, the more population growth declines, and eventually becomes negative. Breeding and overpopulation is the LAST thing you should be worried about. Worry quite a lot more about what happens when most economies are dependent on a larger base of young people to support an aging popul
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The total costs will be hugely less than what we are spending to deal with the mess they are making.
Poor people use fuck all resources. The average 1st worlder uses at least 100x resources than the average 3rd worlder.
Americans constitute 5% of the world's population but consume 24% of the world's energy.
On average, one American consumes as much energy as
o 2 Japanese
o 6 Mexicans
o 13 Chinese
o 31 Indians
o 128 Bangladeshis
o 307 Tanzanians
o
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I think these aid organisations are all unable to correct their world view, especially where they are actually causing problems.
A main driver of population growth is the reduction of child deaths
Everybody Panic! (Score:4, Funny)
It's the end of the world yet again?
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I hope everybody knows where their towel is!
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What makes you think that you will be the one person saved when the earth goes flatline?
Re:Thanks for.. (Score:1)
Re:Front row seats (Score:1)
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In other news, 100% of IPCC scientists live in urban areas and have never visited a farm.
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You jest, but don't be surprised if the vast majority have never been to "fly over country".
In fact, it is highly likely that these people would quickly starve should there be some catastrophe.
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And if push ever comes to shove, a famine can always be arranged. That is why I fear the oncoming civil war.
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Fucking AC says what?
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Of course the USA is only a small part part of the earth's land area.
Still, I agree: 75% seems like an overestimate.
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Overestimate? The word you are looking for is: lie.
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To make 75% even remotely true, it means that most places are completely corrupted and ruined.
No. Please re-read. Not everything is to one extreme or another. "have lost some or most of their functions" the key word there is "some". If once fertile virgin soil now requires amendments in order to be productive, that's a lost function. In the US this isn't a big deal, we normally use fertilizers and amendments in our agricultural practices. If you don't have these, then your going to have to use crop rotation and more land area as you let some of the land go fallow for one or two years. Local changes
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"have lost some or most of their functions" the key word there is "some". If once fertile virgin soil now requires amendments in order to be productive, that's a lost function.
Well congrats for pointing out the weasel word that let's them make spurious claims while remaining technically true. But it doesn't change the fact that this is fear-mongering bullshit.
Put another way 75% of Earth is no longer pristine.
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Put another way 75% of Earth is no longer pristine.
Yeah, no big surprise there. Even the moorlands [bbc.co.uk] of Great Britain would have been forests some thousands of years ago before humans cleared them.
It's sensational journalism that isn't quite as exciting once you pick at the details a bit.
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When you fly over the US, you see miles and miles of nice green farmland and everything looks fine. The problem is that that land has lost much of its topsoil and what is left has been poisoned with chemicals and the groundwater is depleted. From 30,000 feet it looks fine but when you look closely, not so good.
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Yeah, it's so polluted that you can only get harvests 5-10x as big as they were getting a century ago....
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Good for the next few years but not for the next century.
Consumption of beef largely to blame (Score:2)
> "The UN-backed report underscores the urgent need for consumers, companies and governments to rein in excessive consumption – particularly of beef – and for farmers to draw back from conversions of forests and wetlands, according to the authors."
Land degradation threatens human wellbeing, major report warns
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/26/land-degradation-is-undermining-human-wellbeing-un-report-warns
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It always comes down to them wanting us in be living in caves, scratching for berries and leaves.
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Agricultural practices that yield short term profits is not the same as feeding people.
missing car analogy (Score:4, Funny)
Like a broken cell phone that can only text or take pictures, but not make a single call, more than 75 percent of the Earth's land areas have lost some or most of their functions, undermining the well-being of the 3.2 billion people that rely on them to produce food crops, provide clean water, control flooding and more.
As far as I'm concerned, if it's not like a broken car, then it doesn't matter.
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As far as I'm concerned, if it's not like a broken car, then it doesn't matter.
You must be a Gen Xer.
As a millennial you can have my car, just don't take my mobile internet connection.
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Good guess, but clovis was born near the beginning of the baby boomer era.
This is what our phone looked like when I was a kid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
We didn't use phone analogies because these things almost never broke. I never saw a broken one, but I suppose it could happen.
If one did break, it was probably because a car had run over it. Or a car had knocked down the telephone pole that carried the wires.
Lightning could strike the house, but that phone would still work. It might have killed you i
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Wow there. Didn't want to start anything, just going for a funny myself. Personally I'm not actually a millennial either. :-)
And I remember those phones. What really sucked was dialing my grandma internationally. I could call friends faster than I could punch out the 0011 international transfer number. That damn wheel took so long to click back. *shudder* It didn't help her number had a few more 0s in it.
Side note have you taken apart one of those phones before? There was nothing in them to break. They were
75% is bollocks (Score:2)
Well, common sense says this is bollocks.
This https://www.umweltbundesamt.de... [umweltbundesamt.de] is a picture about the usage of area in Germany. Germany is a very densely populated country.
Blue is water, yellow is mining etc. in between settlements and traffic/streets/rails.
Dark green, about 30% woods. 50% light green is agriculture. Those two numbers are misleading as a wood has pretty special restrictions to be counted as a wood. So I would estimate it is more likely 40% woods and 40% agriculture, by a layman definition.
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While we worldwide have erosion problems, e.g. in 3rd world countries like the central USA,
That sort of tired rhetoric isn't helping you get your point across.
I believe he meant central America, not central USA. Although I wouldn't recommend using the term 3rd world anymore because it's unclear exactly what that means anymore.
Wait! What? (Score:2)
Like a broken cell phone that can only text or take pictures, but not make a single call, ...
You can make phone calls with a cell phone? And... talk... to people...?
Totally suited for Kaiju (Score:1)
What, you thought we weren't being attacked?
If were simulated... (Score:1)
Meh (Score:2)
Flat-earther, huh? (Score:1)
CORRECTION. (Score:1)