Editing IPCC:AR6/SRCCL/Chapter-3 (section)

=== 3.1.2 Desertification in previous IPCC and related reports ===

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The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) and Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C include a limited discussion of desertification. In AR5 Working Group I desertification is mentioned as a forcing agent for the production of atmospheric dust (Myhre et al. 2013 <sup>[[#fn:r43|43]]</sup> ). The same report had low confidence in the available projections on the changes in dust loadings due to climate change (Boucher et al. 2013 <sup>[[#fn:r44|44]]</sup> ). In AR5 Working Group II desertification is identified as a process that can lead to reductions in crop yields and the resilience of agricultural and pastoral livelihoods (Field et al. 2014 <sup>[[#fn:r45|45]]</sup> ; Klein et al. 2015 <sup>[[#fn:r46|46]]</sup> ). AR5 Working Group II notes that climate change will amplify water scarcity, with negative impacts on agricultural systems, particularly in semi-arid environments of Africa ( ''high confidence'' ), while droughts could exacerbate desertification in southwestern parts of Central Asia (Field et al. 2014). AR5 Working Group III identifies desertification as one of a number of often overlapping issues that must be dealt with when considering governance of mitigation and adaptation (Fleurbaey et al. 2014 <sup>[[#fn:r47|47]]</sup> ). The IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C noted that limiting global warming to 1.5°C instead of 2°C is strongly beneficial for land ecosystems and their services ( ''high confidence'' ) such as soil conservation, contributing to avoidance of desertification (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r48|48]]</sup> ).

The recent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Land Degradation and Restoration Assessment report (IPBES 2018a <sup>[[#fn:r49|49]]</sup> ) is also of particular relevance. While acknowledging a wide variety of past estimates of the area undergoing degradation, IPBES (2018a) pointed at their lack of agreement about where degradation is taking place. IPBES (2018a) also recognised the challenges associated with differentiating the impacts of climate variability and change on land degradation from the impacts of human activities at a regional or global scale.

The third edition of the World Atlas of Desertification (Cherlet et al. 2018 <sup>[[#fn:r50|50]]</sup> ) indicated that it is not possible to deterministically map the global extent of land degradation – and its subset, desertification – pointing out that the complexity of interactions between social, economic, and environmental systems make land degradation not amenable to mapping at a global scale. Instead, Cherlet et al. (2018) presented global maps highlighting the convergence of various pressures on land resources.

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