On the front line.

14 The drylands are on the front line of climate change, and they include the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. We are already seeing in them the harrowing effects of climate change on poverty, survival, health, hunger, human well-being — and on peace itself, because the heavily impacted drylands are among the most unstable parts of the world. The stretch from Senegal through to Afghanistan is a region of great vulnerability, poverty, and deprivation of basic needs — whether food and nutrition, access to health and veterinary care, safety for crops and livestock, or, of course, water. Instability is rising throughout this region: conflicts that are branded under the political headline of extremism, or political conflict, often have at their roots the challenges of desertification, increasing droughts, more unstable rainfall, many more failed harvests than in the past, and — in some regions — an inability to grow crops reliably any longer. The current famine in the Horn of Africa, which has left more than ten million people fighting for survival, is a vivid and harrowing demonstration of the perils of desertification and drylands instability. In the front line