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+22 per minute · since 00:00 UTC
This is a live, continuously changing estimate. It isn't printed here because a figure on paper would be wrong the moment you read it — see the current value at https://earthnow.app/signal/land-lost-to-desertification-today.
Estimated, not measured
Desertification is usually not a desert advancing. It is productive land degrading in place, driven more by how the land is managed than by rainfall.
Estimated hectares of productive land degraded to the point of losing agricultural value since midnight UTC.
Nobody counts this as it happens. EarthNow takes a published figure for the whole day, divides it by the 86,400 seconds in a day, and multiplies by the seconds elapsed since midnight UTC. So the value climbs smoothly and is the right order of magnitude — but the smoothness is arithmetic, not observation. Nothing happening in the world is being watched in real time.
value = daily total ÷ 86,400 × seconds since 00:00 UTC
A consequence worth knowing: the counter resets at midnight UTC, not at your midnight. And because the figure advances at a constant rate, this page cannot tell you whether today is unusual. For that you need a measurement.
12 million hectares lost each year to desertification and drought in drylands — the subset UNCCD reports separately from the ~100 Mha of all land degradation.
The figure is theirs; the running total is ours. Cite them for the number, and EarthNow for what it looks like as it accumulates.
Citation