Curbing land degradation and mitigating climate change in mountainous regions: a systemic review

Human population is envisaged to continue to grow, with a tremendous contribution to land degradation and climate change. Climate change and land degradation are intertwined, thus tackling climate change means mitigating land degradation. Climate change is a worldwide problem that affects lives and livelihoods; henceforth, mitigating measures are urgently required. With their unique, rich biodiversity, mountain areas are severely sensitive to climate change and land degradation; therefore, a speedy need to curb land degradation in mountain areas is needed. The aim of this systematic review was to appraise different strategic methods used globally to minimise land degradation and sustain mountainous areas in a frequently changing climate. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was utilised in this systematic review. The Scopus data base was utilised for document search, with a selection of articles limited between the years 2012 and 2021. Only articles written in English were considered. After assessing the abstracts, 703 articles were retained for a full review, leading to the final selection of 84 articles. The results show that soil erosion, overgrazing and construction of infrastructure are major causes of land degradation. The human population increase is also an enormous contributing factor to activities leading to land degradation and climate change. A conspicuous intensification of agricultural activities is expected to continue due to rising food demand. Curbing land degradation and climate change in mountain areas can be enforced by the government through stricter regulations. However, regulations and policies must be locally initiated, instead of globally initiated, with local communities being the main stakeholders. Hence, bottom-up rather than top-down policies would encourage local communities to embrace mitigation policy initiatives.