Desertification and climate change: The case for greater convergence

Poor knowledge of links between desertification and global climate change is limiting funding from the Global Environment Facility for anti-desertification projects and realization of synergies between the Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD) and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). Greater convergence between research in the two fields could overcome these limitations, improve our knowledge of desertification, and benefit four areas of global climate change studies: mitigation assessment; accounting for land cover change in the carbon budget; land surface-atmosphere interactions; and climate change impact forecasting. Convergence would be assisted if desertification were treated more as a special case in dry areas of the global process of land degradation, and stimulated by: (a) closer cooperation between the FCCC and CCD; (b) better informal networking between desertification and global climate change scientists, e.g. within the framework of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Both strategies would be facilitated if the FCCC and CCD requested the IPCC to provide a scientific framework for realizing the synergies between them.