General Information

Objective #15 promotes the care of nature and terrestrial life by making people aware of pollution and damage to the environment produced by humans.
Through this, human beings are more responsible and help each and every one of the living beings that inhabit the earth have the necessary care for their development in a suitable environment.

OBJECTIVES

1. Adopt urgent and significant measures to reduce the degradation of natural habitats, halt the loss of biodiversity and, by 2020, protect threatened species and prevent extinction.

2. By 2030, combat desertification, rehabilitate degraded lands and soils, including lands affected by deserities to promote sustainable livelihood opportunities.tification, drought and floods, and seek to achieve a world with a neutral land degradation.

3. Increase global support to the fight against poaching and trafficking in protected species, in particular by increasing the capacity of local communities to promote sustainable livelihood opportunities

Deforestation and desertification -provoked by human activities and climate change- pose major challenges to sustainable development and have affected the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the fight against poverty. Measures are being implemented for forest management and combating desertification.

Human life depends on the land. Flora provides 80 percent of human food and agriculture represents an important economic resource and means of development. Forests, on the other hand, cover 30 percent of the land surface, provide crucial habitats for millions of species, and are an important source of clean air and water. In addition, they are critical to combating climate change

The life of the flora and fauna are not the only ones that are at stake but also that of human beings, this can be seen in the collected figures:

Some 135 million people may be displaced by 2045 as a result of desertification.

Humans obtain more than 99.7% of their food (calories) from land.
If agricultural land productivity remains at its current levels, an estimated 6 million hectares of land would need to be converted to agricultural production every year until at least 2030 to satisfy the growing demand.
Over the last ten years, approximately 5.2 million hectares of forest has been destroyed each year.
Land degradation over the next 25 years may reduce global food production by up to 12%, resulting in a possible 30% increase in world food prices.
As a result of climate change, median crop yields may fall by 2% every 10 years for the rest of the century.
By 2050, the number of people at risk of hunger as a result of climate change is expected to increase by 10 - 20% more than would occur without climate change.
By the 2050s, 50% of agricultural land in Latin America will be subject to desertification.

But the future can change if we take actions today, due to the exhaustion of resources over the years, this has a cost:

2 billion hectares of degraded land worldwide have the potential for land rehabilitation and forest restoration.
The cost of land restoration ranges from 33.227 Euros per hectare.