Eating into land: Only 12% of the earth’s rangelands are protected and industrial-scale farmers as well as pastoralists such as these from Nigeria are causing these areas to shrink. Photo: Luis Tato/AFP
World-famous rangelands such as the Mongolian steppe, the savannas of Africa, the pampas of South America and the Great Plains of North America are under increasing threat from climate change and biodiversity loss, according to a newly released Rangelands Atlas.
The atlas, which for the first time quantifies the extent of rangelands on the planet’s land surface, has been compiled by an expert coalition to document and raise awareness on the “enormous environmental, economic and social value of rangelands as well as their different ecosystems”.
More than half of the planet’s land surface consists of vast tracts of land covered by grass, shrubs or sparse, hardy vegetation, which supports millions of pastoralists, hunter-gatherers and ranchers.
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Rangelands, too, provide habitat for a range of wildlife, many species found nowhere else, store vast amounts of carbon and either originate or serve as freshwater catchment areas for most of the world’s largest rivers and wetlands.
But rangelands have been neglected and overlooked, the authors say — only 10% of national climate plans, under the Paris Agreement, refer to rangelands, compared to 70% for forests.
This leaves “massive planetary ecosystems supporting people and nature exposed to a wide variety of threats”.
The authors are from the International Union for Conser-vation of Nature, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation, World Wide Fund for Nature, the UN Environment Programme, the Rangelands Initiative of the International Land Coalition and the International Livestock Research Institute, and aim to use the atlas to make rangelands a prominent part of policy discussions.
Just 12% of rangelands are designated as protected areas.
The report details how the Northern Great Plains, for example, one of only four remaining intact temperate grasslands in the world, have been vanishing in recent years at a faster rate than deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
“The primary threat to this unique ecosystem is agriculture and, in particular, large-scale mechanised and industrial farming. When grasslands are destroyed, they emit carbon dioxide, drastically weakening the land’s ability to support wildlife, stabilise the soil and provide clean water,” according to the report.
In the past 300 years more than 60% of wildlands and woodlands have been converted — an area larger than North America — and an area about the size of Australia is now used to produce crops.
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Rangelands are “nature’s gift to humanity”, writes Ibrahim Thiaw, the executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, in the report.
“Humans first emerged as a species from East Africa’s rangelands to spread out and populate the whole planet.”
They provide much of the agriculture that feeds humanity, “wherever we live, and are vast and surprisingly diverse, covering over half of our planet’s land”.
But the problem is the ease with which they can be put to work by humans: for agriculture or settlement.
“Wherever rangelands are found, our unsustainable consumption and production patterns are driving land use changes, including the conversion of grasslands and savannas previously used by wildlife and for grazing livestock by pastoralists.”
The restoration of degraded rangelands, says Thiaw, will deliver better food and water security, more locking away of carbon emissions into soil, more biodiversity, and healthy air quality.
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