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  • Anti-desertification plan gets official launch in Rio


[RIO DE JANEIRO] Organisations from Africa, Brazil and France have officially launched a scientific collaboration to fight desertification in Africa.







Michel Laurent, IRD's director-general, said the collaboration aimed to build scientific capacity in Africa and strengthen links between scientific and civil society groups for sustainable development in in Africa's arid and semi-arid regions.

"We want to [assimilate] knowledge through both research on the ground, and data on the region's evolution collected through satellites, to help improve policies dealing with desertification, and to enable the betterment of people's lives," said Laurent.

"The situation in the Sahel area is continuing to deteriorate, with desertification spreading southwards and causing many people to migrate," he told SciDev.Net.

Laurent added that it was important to restore areas already affected by desertification, through afforestation, pastoralism and sustainable agriculture.

Idriss Déby, president of Chad, told the meeting that desertification was "affecting millions of people in Africa". Unless tough action was taken immediately, it would degrade many parts of the continent, making them unfit for human habitation.

Déby said the new collaboration should not lose momentum through protracted scientific discussions, and appealed for international solidarity to help raise funds. "We need funds to allow us to act now," he said at the signing ceremony.

Abdoulaya Dia, PAGGW's chief executive officer, said that the conservation of natural resources and biodiversity in desert and semi-desert areas was a high priority for Africa. The new collaboration should evaluate existing traditional knowledge alongside conventional scientific knowledge, he added.


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