How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change

A powerful TED talk by Clifford Allan Redin Savory on desertification (the process of land turning into desert). Desertification is happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, which is accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it.

Savory is a Zimbabwean ecologist, livestock farmer, president and co-founder of the Savory Institute.

Key Points:

• Using planned movements of livestock to mimic the former herd migrations of nature can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert (Holistic Management Agriculture). Smaller groups of livestock are gathered into larger “herds” and a holistic view is taken to plan the movements of the herd over vast areas of land across a season. This allows for the grass, shrubs, etc. to be eaten and the remains to cover the ground. By covering the ground, the temperatures become higher during night-time and lower during day-time, which stops the land from turning barren and stops the releasing of carbon into the atmosphere. This also enables the earth to hold larger quantities of the water during rainy season, rather than having it evaporate which is what happens when the ground is barren.
  
• This approach yields better crops and re-growth of trees, grass and other kinds of vegetation.
  
• The planned movements of livestock approach has been used successfully to stop desertification and bring back grasslands in areas in e.g. Zimbabwe, Mexico and Patagonia in Argentina.
  
• The approach is already being used across 15 million hectares of land on 5 continents.
  
• If this approach is used on half of the grasslands in risk of desertification across the world, we will be able to take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in the ground (for thousands of years) at an amount that would bring us back to pre-industrial age levels (of carbon in the atmosphere). All this while being able to feed people off the livestock grazing on these lands.
  
• The practice of slash-and-burn cultivation of forests and grasslands, leaves the soil bare which releases carbon. Burning 1 hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6 000 cars. In Africa, every single year, more than 1 billion hectares of grasslands is being burned. This approach must be stopped, and be replaced with Holistic Management Agriculture.