Medellín, Colombia — Land degradation will unleash a mass migration of at least 50-million people by 2050 — or as many as 700-million unless humans stop depleting the life-giving resource, dozens of scientists warned on Monday. Already, land decay caused by unsustainable farming, mining, pollution, and city expansion is undermining the wellbeing of some 3.2-billion people — 40% of the global population, they said in the first comprehensive assessment of land health. The condition of land is "critical", said the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). "We’ve converted large amounts of our forests, we’ve converted large amounts of our grasslands, we’ve lost 87% of our wetlands ... we’ve really changed our land surface in the last several hundred years," IPBES chairman Robert Watson said of the findings. "The message is that land degradation, loss of productivity of those soils and those vegetations will force people to move. It will be...
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