The United Nations (UN) has launched its International Year of Deserts and Desertification to raise global public awareness of the advancing deserts, of ways to safeguard the biological diversity of arid lands covering one-third of the planet and protecting the knowledge and traditions of the two billion people affected by the phenomenon. As reported by Ghana News Today, the Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) stressed the importance of recognizing that in addition to the human and environmental cost of the degradation that contributes to the problem, the dry lands are the location of some of the most magnificent ecosystems of this world: the deserts.