Tomorrow today; 2010 - unesdoc - Unesco

Image: © Chetan Soni & UNCCD 2009 Photo Contest
Image: © Rodney Dekkeri & UNCCD 2009 Photo Contest
Water scarcity is a global challenge
Sustainable land management is essential
Join the campaigns and make a difference
society organizations and science and technology institutions. The
reports may include education initiatives conducted in the formal
and non-formal education sectors. They will also be distinct from
advocacy and awareness initiatives, each of which has its own
performance measures.
Image: © Sebastian Gortari & UNCCD 2009 Photo Contest
Building on the DESD: a new decade dedicated to combating
desertification
In 2007, the United Nations declared 2010-2020 the United Nations
Decade for Deserts and the Fight against Desertification (UNDDD). 4
The purpose is to organize observance activities that will raise awareness
about the causes of and solutions to ongoing land degradation
and desertification. In declaring the Decade, the United Nations drew
attention to two things: first, the deteriorating situation of desertification
in all regions, especially in Africa, and second, its implications for
the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, more specifically,
poverty eradication and environmental sustainability.
Similar concerns led to the declaration of the DESD. Therefore,
linking the two initiatives can scale up the progress towards
sustainable development and poverty eradication. DESD initiatives
could incorporate substantive knowledge of land
degradation in their education work. The UNDDD
could design educational activities for its campaigns
in cooperation with schools and youth groups. Such
collaboration is essential, given the challenges in
education among drylands communities.
For example, the results of an Annual Learning
Assessment of children aged 6-16 years in Kenya conducted
to assess “whether children are learning anything,” and
released in April 2010, found that, on average, children
in the drylands areas are the least equipped with the basic
skills needed for learning. More than half of the children
in these areas lack the competence to read texts in either
English or Kiswahili or to compute mathematics meant for
children with only two years of learning. 5 Therefore, for
the UNCCD to reach drylands communities, the expertise
of the DESD in education programmes is essential.
Similarly, the UNDDD needs to identify suitable content
for the DESD campaigns.
Among the topics envisioned for the UNCCD educational
materials are the feasibility of land restoration
and soil health, the global benefits of land/soils, making
the case for private sector involvement in sustainable
land management, ‘how-to’ materials on solutions to the
problem of land degradation, and ‘training the trainers’
packages for informal education programmes. In future,
existing materials will be reviewed to improve the data
and analyses.
Together, by pooling our resources, we can make a
great difference in the livelihoods of people who live in
the drylands and to their environments.
Researchers studying sustainable land and water
management in drylands and many grassroots level
success stories occurring on continents have provided
the knowledge needed to successfully roll back desertification.
So to a large extent, the key challenge we face
is the sharing of required knowledge in order to scale
up and disseminate the best options for success. And
that is, indeed, an educational challenge.
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