In the present, the top three environmental issues facing the Thar are water availability, land quality and dust emission. While dwindling water reserves call for urgent attention to water management, threats of global warming and population pressure are not only deteriorating the land condition, but also increasing the sand mobility and atmospheric dust load.
The Thar Desert is one of the most fragile ecosystems of India. Its low and uncertain rainfall, high temperatures, high wind speeds, and a rolling sandy topography dominated by 10 to 40 m high sand dunes, provide an awe inspiring glimpse of desolation and emptiness in the western part of Rajasthan in India and adjoining part of Pakistan, between the Aravalli Hill Ranges and the fertile Indus Valley. The Desert also has occasional small stretches of sandy alluvial plains with sparse vegetation. The plains have mostly been formed by dry streams that originate from the Aravallis, but also partly by a major Himalayan stream that has long disappeared. Because of insufficient rainfall and sandy terrain, the present day streams cannot flow for long distances, and disappear in the thickness of the sand.
Despite its dryness, the Thar has its own precious natural endowments, on the strength of which it formed a hinterland to the cradle of civilization in the Saraswati-Indus Plains (circa 3300-1300 BC). Apart from its well built people, who have over the last few millennia developed a strong adaptive mechanism to the extremes of the environment, the desert also has a wealth of animal resources that thrive and perform well under dry conditions. Survival instinct under uncertain rainfall, long and severe drought, strong sun, high wind, poor soils and above all, limited water availability has compelled the desert dwellers to innovate constantly for a better sedentary life from the available land resources. This is in stark contrast to the Sahara-Sahel region of Africa where large scale transhumance is still a major adaptive mechanism.
Thar Desert has a distinctive set of traditional wisdom, at the core of which lie the themes of water conservation, mixed farming of crops and livestock, agroforestry and land care. This is unlike the history of settlement in many other deserts where animal husbandry and migration were the core concepts.
Proximity to the Harappan towns and cities, a large number of which grew in the then-drying Saraswati River valley (present day Ghaggar River that once used to carry the waters of the Sutlej also, but long before the Harappans settled), meant that the desert population had an added opportunity of trading in crop and animal products, and hence an urge to evolve technologies for water conservation and dryland agriculture.
Since then a system of agriculture, based on mixed cropping and animal husbandry that depended on the optimum utilisation of the capricious monsoon rainfall and the management and care of the region’s fragile land resources, became a strong asset of the region. The mixed cropping helped to take care of grain production in years of monsoon aberrations, while animal husbandry helped most during droughts, not only through sales proceeds of the live animals, but also animal products.
A host of practices for land care and water conservation are in-built in the traditional customs and agricultural practices of the rural population. Practices like keeping the land fallow for some seasons to regain the soil nutrients (long fallow for 2-5 years; short fallow for a year), erecting fences around fields during summer to trap the suspended silt that blows in from the fertile plains during sandstorms (aandhi) or to prevent the soil from blowing away, lopping of trees (rather than felling) for fuel and fodder, management of permanent pastures for grazing, rotational grazing practices etc.
Unfortunately, the situation has started changing with population growth and modernisation. As the rate of change became faster, the first casualty was the system of land fallowing. Permanent pastures have become almost bereft of ground flora, and browse-worthy shrubs have become fewer, which has encouraged the non-browsable plant species to invade. Sparse natural woody vegetation on the sand dunes and low sandy hummocks has gradually become the target of fuel wood collectors, the loss of which has loosened the structure of sand, making the dunes more vulnerable to wind during the dry summer months.
In the wake of the Green Revolution major changes started to happen in the neighbouring fertile plains of Punjab and Haryana, where science mediated crop production technologies showed the road to self sufficiency in agriculture, especially through the use of improved seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, mechanisation of tillage and harvest and irrigation facilities.
Soon, the echo of the Green Revolution started sounding in the arid western districts of Rajasthan as well. Farmers first opted for diesel pump sets for energising their wells, especially for winter cropping. With time, as rural electrification progressed and the state ground water department moved in to sink tube wells for drinking purposes, the farmers followed suit and started sinking their own wells for irrigation. The total sown area increased from 7.8 million hectares in 1950-51 to 10.09 in 1980 and to 10.94 by 2005. At the same time, irrigated land increased from 0.363 million hectares in 1950-51 to 1.39 in 1980 and to 2.77 in 2005, where canal networks (essentially the Indira Gandhi Canal system) accounted for 43 per cent of the irrigated area, and electrified wells the remaining 57 per cent.
Tractors followed soon after electrification and their numbers swelled from 14.5 thousand in 1980 to 200 thousand by 2005. This increase is justified by the need for quick tillage and sowing operations after rains in a sandy terrain, which have to be completed within 2 days of a 30 mm rainfall event at the break of monsoon (usually early July). Otherwise, the strong sun evaporates the soil moisture and the opportunity is lost. Tractor operation, however, is antagonistic to the random distribution of trees and shrubs in a field. The easiest choice was, therefore, to uproot the trees and shrubs in the fields. The fields thus lost their uniqueness as models of traditional agroforestry. With improved irrigation, the demand for cropland increased and the tractors gradually began to climb the sand dunes, which earlier served mostly as natural rangelands and used to be brought under cropping only during good rains. Gradually, almost the whole of the sandy tract in the desert became deep ploughed by tractors, which meant destabilisation of sand over a large area. Today many sand dunes in the eastern half of the desert are under crops where tractors plough the land and sprinkler irrigation helps grow winter crops for cash.
Irrigation led to an enormous increase in crop production, especially in the winter crops that fetched large income for the farmers. Groundwater was a free commodity and the farmers were enthused by the success of irrigation, as a consequence over irrigation of the fields became common. In the canal command areas misuse of water led to water logging and salinity in many parts of Ganganagar, Hanumangarh and Bikaner districts.
At the same time, government efforts to provide drinking water to all the villages continued. The pipeline grids for drinking water helped people to avoid the drudgery of fetching water from long distances, but this also led to a neglect of the traditional water harvesting structures, many of which silted up and their catchments became disturbed and encroached upon. The examples of worst neglect can be found in the Sekhawati tract, especially in the districts of Sikar, Churu and Jhunjhunu.
The major use of groundwater is not for drinking (<15 per cent), but for irrigation (>80 per cent). As pumping of groundwater increased, the discharge from many wells began to dwindle, and the aquifers began to dry up. The affected farmers started going deeper for water, which not only escalated the cost of lifting water, but in many cases the lifted water was also found to be of poor quality. The soils were affected and the yields were reduced. Irrigated farming then became either unremunerative or difficult to pursue due to the dried up aquifers. This forced many farmers to shift back from the irrigated winter cropping to the rain fed subsistence farming in monsoon, which led to new socio cultural problems for the affected families.
Meanwhile, the sandy soil, bereft of a minimum vegetation cover and loosened by years of tractor ploughing, became more vulnerable to strong summer winds of March to June. Fortunately, the average wind speed has fallen in much of the 1990s and the 2000s from its last peak in the mid 1980s. Despite this, the atmospheric dust load has shown signs of some increase in the recent years, due mainly to the critical changes in land uses and land cover.
The ferocity of the wind and the attendant sand mobility during the early 1950s and 60s are still remembered as extraordinary by the local inhabitants. The sand mobilisation was so strong that it compelled the Indian Parliament to create a Desert Afforestation Station at Jodhpur, to understand the phenomenon and to stabilise the sand dunes so that the fertile lands to the east of the desert did not get encroached upon.
This Station was further developed in 1959 by the Government of India with the guidance of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as the Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI). It is now a major international institute for all encompassing research on the desert and has not only developed technologies for sand dune stabilisation and shelterbelt plantation, but has also stabilised many dunes across the desert to demonstrate the technology. Systematic research by CAZRI over the last five decades has produced several need based and cost effective technologies for sustainable land management and agricultural development.
Unfortunately, the adoption rates of the technologies are not as desired, because of socio economic considerations like inadequate finances, illiteracy, slow land reforms, lack of trained personnel, lack of market facilities, etc., as well as due to the lure of easy money from the almost free use of water. Meanwhile, the land condition is deteriorating due to human pressure, leading to desertification, especially through wind and water erosion, water logging, salinisation and vegetation degradation, which in turn is impacting the society. Industrial pollution is gradually becoming another major threat near the urban centres.
In the present, the top three environmental issues in the desert are water availability, land quality and dust emission. While dwindling water reserves call for urgent attention to water management, threats of global warming and population pressure are not only deteriorating the land condition, but also increasing the sand mobility and atmospheric dust load. In fact, there is now the threat of double vulnerability – to natural process acceleration and resource usurpation by humans – that might reflect sharply on soil quality deterioration and performance of the existing plant species, including crops.
Yields of some crops may decline by 20-30 per cent unless remedial interventions are made. As winter temperature increases, some high value crops like cumin and wheat are already getting affected. Growing summer crops (kharif) is becoming more speculative due to shifts in rainy days and rainfall intensity. Earlier the rainfall distribution during June-September was almost like a bell shape, where the maximum concentration was during July-August. This pattern is gradually showing signs of a shift towards a double peak, one in May-June and another in August-September, which compels farmers either to speculate for a July rain or to rush for out of season purchase of inputs like seeds and fertilizer, and then gamble for a good distribution of rain during the crop growth stages.
There is every possibility that the summer wind strength will also gradually increase over the next few decades. When seen in the context of changes made in land tillage and the impact of empty aquifers, this may lead to a much higher potential for sand mobilisation than experienced during the last fifty years.
If that happens, there is a fair chance that wind blown sand will start spreading beyond the eastern border of the Thar. This process may be assisted by reactivation of the presently stable sandy landscape to the east and north of the Thar that formed parts of a Mega-Thar some 10-20 thousand years ago. These eastern sandy areas became naturally stabilised when the rainfall increased 5-8 thousand years ago, and the desert area shrank to the west of the Aravalli Hills. Since population pressure is now very high in this sandy terrain, the aquifers have become almost dry and the land surface temperature is increasing, a suitable trigger could remobilise the thick sandy areas.
To save the Thar and the land beyond from a disastrous situation, steps need to be taken urgently. These should include: increasing the green cover in the sandy terrain to minimise wind erosion and soil nutrient loss; improving water use efficiency of crops and developing heat and drought tolerance in them; management strategies to meet the challenges of increased drought and flood frequencies; improving the livestock production system as a strong alternative to crop based economy; a proper understanding and close monitoring of land surface processes; and above all water storage and conservation, mainly through artificial recharge.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.