Advancing Sands: New films offer a closer look
at desertification and migration

To mark the United Nations Year of Deserts and Desertification 2006, a package of new TV programmes are being lined up by TVE Asia Pacific's partner, dev.tv.

The Geneva-based Swiss foundation has produced a special edition of the BBC World Debate, as well as a series of documentaries that look at land degradation and the spread of deserts in different regions of the world.

The BBC World TV debate was filmed on 5 October 2006 at the headquarters of IUCN – the World Conservation Union. Titled Advancing Sands: Deserts and Migration, it was  moderated by BBC newscaster Zeinab Badawi and involved six internationally renowned panelists:

• Ibrahim Thiaw, Acting Director General of the World Conservation Union (IUCN)
• Sunita Narain, Director of the Centre for Science and the Environment (India)
• Martin Sommer, Director Natural Resources and Environment Division, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation
• Fatima Jibrell, Executive Director of Horn Relief (Somalia)
• Rosamund McDougall, member of the Advisory Council of the Optimum Population Trust
• Christian Mersmann, Managing Director, Global Mechanism of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification

The debate covered the impact of population and livestock increase on fragile dryland ecosystems, and to what extent desertification contributes to ethnic conflict and human migration.

After the initial BBC World broadcast, the Debate will be offered to all interested regional and national TV stations. TVE Asia Pacific has made arrangements with dev.tv to distribute the debate to broadcasters in the Asia Pacific region, free of a license fee. Contact TVEAP Distribution at: .

Meanwhile, dev.tv and One Planet Pictures have jointly produced Villages on the Front Line, an eight-part series documenting the struggle against land degradation and water shortage. Case studies have come from villages in China, Jordan, Tanzania, the wider Caribbean, Morocco, Niger, India and Spain. Each film is introduced by a local presenter.

The new series will start its initial weekly broadcasts on BBC World on 10 November 2006. After the BBC World broadcast, it will be shown on the dev.tv broadband channel and distributed to various regional and national TV channels worldwide. This series will be available in the Asia Pacific region from TVE Asia Pacific in early 2007. Contact TVEAP Distribution at: .

Click here for more information on Villages on the Front Line, and BBC World broadcast dates and times.

Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas. It is a gradual process of the loss of soil productivity and the thinning out of the vegetative cover resulting from human activities and climatic variations such as prolonged droughts and floods. The land's topsoil, which takes centuries to build up, can be blown or washed away in a few seasons. Among human causal factors are over-cultivation, overgrazing, deforestation and poor irrigation practices. Such overexploitation is generally caused by economic and social pressure, ignorance, war and drought.

According to the UN, desertification is a worldwide problem directly affecting 250 million people and more than 4 billion hectares of land – one third of the Earth's surface area. In addition, desertification threatens the livelihoods of some one billion people who depend on land for most of their needs and are usually the world's poorest, in more than 100 countries.

With the adoption in 1994 of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), the issue was given proper political recognition. Desertification as a global challenge, together with Climate Change and Biodiversity, now enjoys the support of a strong coalition of partners. But, according to the UNCCD Secretariat, public awareness has not kept pace. In relation to the true scope and magnitude of the problem, “desertification still receives too little attention and is little understood by the public at large.”

The new films will help fill part of this gap.