In Australia, a study by UNICEF (2017) found that children and young people are struggling under significant pressures, with drought-related stress and psychological distress among younger farmers.


2018; World Wild Fund for Nature [WWF] 2018a). Food production is the largest use of land (50 per cent of habitable land) (Roser and Ritchie 2019). While livestock production (including the production of animal feed) uses 77 per cent of agricultural land, it only provides 16 per cent of the energy and 32 per cent of the protein humans need (Foley et al. 2011; Alexander et al. 2017).


One-quarter of all life on Earth is beneath our feet. Soils contain a multitude of organisms that make critically important ecosystems work. However, soils are being degraded so rapidly that we now have only about 60 years of topsoil left (topsoil is the layer in which plants grow) (Arsenault 2014). Loss of arable land is estimated to be taking place at 30 to 35 times the historical rate, with 12 million hectares of land per year lost through soil degradation related to drought and desertification (United Nations 2019b). Degradation of the world’s cropland and grazing land costs some USD 300 billion per year (Nkonya et al. 2016).


More than 40 per cent of the world’s poor rely on degraded lands for essential services such


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as food, fuel, raw material and water purification. Sustainable Development Goal target 15.3 sets out the ambition to achieve Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN), which aims for no net loss through a balance between three processes: degradation, rehabilitation/restoration and sustainable management (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification [UNCCD] 2018; United Nations 2019c).


Land degradation can affect young people and their families in different ways. In the global South, land degradation and desertification can have long-lasting consequences including falling crop yields, weakened resilience to climate change, massive displacement, disruption of children’s education and increased child labour (Hyland and Russ 2019). In 2019, over 45 million people across Africa, mostly in Eastern and Southern Africa, are food insecure due to prolonged droughts (UNCCD 2019).


In many countries, the impacts of drought and desertification (and other climate-related impacts) may be complicated by tensions over natural resources (Jones and Natalini


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