Caribbean marks desertification day with push to protect rangelands and restore degraded soils

Caribbean stakeholders marked World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought 2026 on Thursday with a renewed appeal to safeguard rangelands and reverse land degradation across the region.

The observance carried the global theme “Rangelands: recognize, respect, restore.” While rangelands are not the dominant land cover on every Caribbean island, speakers pointed to extensive savanna systems across the wider region—from the Rupununi and Sipaliwini savannas of Guyana and Suriname to coastal savannas in Belize—as ecosystems that support livelihoods, biodiversity, and the water and carbon cycles.

Across the Caribbean, farmers are contending with rains that arrive late or fail altogether. Soils that once sustained generations are thinning, rivers are shrinking, and declining fertility, erosion, and lower crop yields are already undermining food and water security rather than posing a distant threat.

Globally, rangelands cover more than half of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, feed hundreds of millions of people, store large carbon reserves, and help regulate continental water supplies. They face mounting pressure from climate change, deforestation, unsustainable land use, and prolonged drought.

Regional officials framed the day as a call for leaders, policymakers, farmers, and citizens to treat land as a living partner rather than a resource to extract. Recognition means valuing rangelands and soils for their ecological, cultural, and spiritual importance—not only their economic worth. Respect means placing farmers, land managers, and indigenous communities at the centre of policy decisions. Restoration means sustained action to heal degraded land through practices that return more to the soil than they remove.

Work is already under way through the Caribbean SIDS Soil Care programme, funded by the Global Environment Facility and implemented with support from the Food and Agriculture Organization. The initiative promotes sustainable land management, land degradation neutrality, and landscape restoration in 14 Caribbean countries.

Looking ahead to the seventeenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in August 2026, Caribbean policymakers were urged to carry farmers’ experiences and soil-protection priorities to the global stage and to press for land degradation in small island developing states to sit at the heart of the international climate resilience agenda.