1/ Data in Table 1 are taken or calculated from: United Nations, 1994a (population size and growth rate); United Nations, 1994b (urban population percentage and growth rate); FAO, 1995 (cropland and forest); World Resources Institute, 1996 (water resources).

2/ For a presentation of the scale by its author, see for instance Falkemnark (1994).

3/ Such reports were presented by all countries covered by the CST Kathmandu except for Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan: see UN (1992). Also see the list of existing reports in Annex 1.

4/ Incidentally, the growth of human settlements is also responsible for the loss of agricultural land; UNCED reports do not dwell on this problem, but other documents do. In India the extension of New Delhi has absorbed more than 60,000 hectares since 1900 (Harrison, 1992), but the growth of villages also takes its toll, as noted as early as 1977 at the Habitat Conference. (In general, land area requirements for urbanization have been estimated between 0.10 and 0.25 hectares per additional inhabitant [Norse et al., 1992].)

5/ Sri Lanka sees the demographic factor from a slightly different angle, that of a "rapid growth in population and, hence, a sharp increase in unemployment".

6/ For a comparison of land degradation patterns among regions of the world, see Annex 2.

7/ Globally 83 percent of land degradation is in the form of erosion: 70 percent mere loss of topsoil and 13 percent more severe terrain deformation.

8/ Either through depletion (from cultivating poor or mediocre soils without sufficient fertilization) or through erosion.

9/ This includes mainly soil compaction and the waterlogging of irrigated areas (together affecting less than 5 percent of degradaded areas worldwide).