Each year the equivalent of three Switzerlands is lost due to desertification and drought in the ‘drylands’, the third of the Earth’s land surface that produces 44% of the world’s food. Millions there are being forced to moveto more productive land, and this is a major cause of conflict.  But this land degradation can not only be halted. It can be reversed.

Luc Gnacadja, Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and Clare Short, former UK Secretary of State for International Development, will lead this day which will:

• Outline the challenge we face

• Show how land degradation can be reversed

• Work on strategies to heighten international attention and action on land degradation in the run-up to September’s UN summit on combating desertification and next year’s Rio+20 summit

Speakers will include:

Yacouba Savadogo from Burkina Faso, a peasant farmer whose work has transformed the lives of thousands across the Sahel, as told in the documentary The Man who Stopped the Desert

Dr Chris Reij, author of Sustaining the Soils

John D Liu, Founder, Environmental Education Media Project

A wide range of people from the drylands, and from UN agencies, NGOs and other organizations active in this field are being invited.

Discussion groups will enable participants to interact, and to discover the creative role each of us can play, both individually and collectively, in the struggle to reverse land degradation.