Search Here

The planet has lost roughly 33 percent of the land that is used to grow food in the last 40 years, a new study says.

The study was carried out by the University of Sheffield's Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures, according to The Guardian. The loss of arable land is happening at a pace that is much faster than the Earth's ability to regenerate itself and provide more land suitable to farming. The rate of loss is approximately 100 times faster than the Earth's ability to generate new top soil.

The researchers behind the study said that the loss may be irreversible without innovative and revolutionary new agricultural techniques. It takes approximately 500 years for the Earth to generate more than than 2 centimeters - 2.5 to be exact - of top soil.

One of the researchers told The Guardian that if serious action isn't taken soon, the entire planet may face conditions similar to the U.S. Dust Bowl of the 1930s. At that time, abuse of top soil and the growing of crops like cotton that suck the nutrients from soil more than other crops, caused massive dust storms in the U.S. West that blew across the entire continent, making their way as far as Washington D.C.

The researchers behind the study will present their findings to more than 150 world leaders that have gathered in Paris in an effort to reach some kind of agreement to combat global warming.

The loss of soil threatens the very existence of the human race. The Guardian notes that demand for food is expected to grow more than 50 percent by 2050 as the human population on Earth reaches or exceeds 9 billion.

Not all is lost however, as the researchers behind the discovery have also offered up some ways to solve the crisis. These include recycling nutrients from sewage for use on soil, making plants less reliable on fertilizers, and swapping crop land with grazing land so that the soil has time to recuperate.