Kazakhstan's Desertification Crisis

The UN climate conference, COP29, held in Baku in November garnered plenty of global attention. But another, lower-profile UN-sponsored COP, shorthand for conference of parties, convened earlier in December in Saudi Arabia. That COP tackled another global warming-related challenge – the spread of desertification.  Barron Joseph Orr, the lead scientist for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), cautioned at the COP about a “knock-on effect” in which warming-caused loss of agricultural land can cause the loss…