By RFIPalled on 11-09-2019Modified on 11-09-2019 at 10:15

The 14th COP on Combating Desertification is currently taking place in New Delhi, India, until Friday, 13 September. The goal is to urge all countries of the world to make concrete commitments to fight for land restoration. Some areas of vegetation are particularly affected by this scourge: the oases.

For centuries, oases have managed to green some areas of the desert. But today they are threatened by the fall of precipitation, as explained to our correspondent in New Delhi , Sébastien Farcis , Patrice Burger, founder of the Association of the Center for Actions and International Achievements (Cari), and facilitator of the associative network of sustainable development of the oases (Raddo): « The fate today which is made to the oases is worrying, first because they are very attacked by the climate change or the warming, the water drop . Governments have forgotten to put hospitals, education systems, and so on. So the living forces have gone to the cities and there are some of the oases today that live on a drip. They are not lost yet, but it is time very seriously that we take care of it .

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In some oases of the Adrar in Mauritania, the desert is already invading the palm groves, threatening the way of life of the local populations. Hamdi who lives in one of these oases is a victim. Three times a week, he must run water between his fifty palm trees and, rare in Mauritania, it is not the drought that worries him, but the advance of the sand: " There was a palm grove at this in law. But there are only a few leaves sticking out of the sand. So, the owner had to abandon it [...] There are already families who have left because of the advance of the desert. We will fight to the end. But if we lose the palm grove, we will have to leave too . " In the Adrar, where the culture of the date makes live thousands of families, the population is fatalistic in front of problems to which they have no solution.

Khettara , a weapon against desertification

But in Morocco, one of the weapons against this desertification is called khettara . It is an ancestral system of underground galleries that fetch water from the water table more than 5 km from the oasis.

Hasna Assini, of the Ferkla Oasis Association for the Environment and Heritage (AOFEP), struggles to preserve these khettaras : " You see palm groves that are degraded because we have no water, in places where there are no khettaras for example. With the khettaras , the oasis populations manage to conserve this important ecosystem ". A third of the Moroccan population lives in oases. The disappearance of these spaces would therefore lead to large and uncontrolled migrations to cities.

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