A review study of global economic evaluations of land degradation based on cost-benefit analysis
2024
Damavandi, Ali Akbar
Land is a source of human life and an important component of sustainable development. It is a vital resource for producing food, preserving biodiversity, and facilitating natural management of water systems, which also serves as a carbon sequestrating medium. Appropriate land management can protect the resources and maximize their benefits to human society. This is while desertification, land degradation, and drought (DLDD) are unfortunately the growingly accelerated processes, particularly in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas. The underlying biophysical and anthropogenic causes of land degradation are multiple, overlapping, and interrelated in a complex manner that are embedded in the understanding of the ‘economics of DLDD’s set of methodologies for assessing the true societal impacts of land degradation. These form the cornerstone of solutions that determine how best financial, technical, and human resources might be allocated to tackle DLDD. The current paper estimates the costs of DLDD, or alternatively, the benefits of sustainable land management (SLM), for different parts of the world. Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) should account for both benefits and costs of halting land degradation. CBA is a powerful tool to help decision makers in their objective selection of different land-use management strategies and, thereby, implement effective, resilience-building interventions when funding is limited. In this regard, the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) method is exploited in this study as a basis for the economic analysis of land degradation. It is, indeed, appropriate economic analysis of the phenomena involved that underlies the efforts to halt or alleviate land degradation on a global scale.
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