Concordance
“desertification” in the General Debate
849 uses across 51 years of statements. First recorded in 1974; used most in 1984, when it appeared 61 times across 28 statements by 28 speakers.
What this counts, and what it does not. This is
the number of times the string desertification appears in the
text of General Debate statements, matched on word boundaries and ignoring
case. It is a fact about a word. It is not a measure of how much any
state cared about the subject, what position it took, or whether it meant it
— and nothing on this page should be read that way.
The final year of this series is machine-transcribed from the official simultaneous interpretation rather than taken from a UN transcript, so it counts what a transcriber heard. See session 80.
Used most by
| Speaker | Uses | Statements | First | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cape Verde | 58 | 25 | 1977 | 2018 |
| Mali | 38 | 18 | 1980 | 2021 |
| Mauritania | 38 | 20 | 1982 | 2025 |
| Mongolia | 38 | 19 | 1993 | 2025 |
| Senegal | 36 | 14 | 1979 | 2018 |
| Niger | 31 | 17 | 1977 | 2013 |
| Burkina Faso | 30 | 15 | 1976 | 2019 |
| Chad | 30 | 19 | 1984 | 2024 |
| Benin | 24 | 12 | 1984 | 2022 |
| The Gambia | 23 | 10 | 1977 | 2019 |
| Sudan | 19 | 13 | 1977 | 2018 |
| Libya | 13 | 9 | 1989 | 2009 |
| Namibia | 12 | 7 | 1992 | 2025 |
| Ethiopia | 12 | 8 | 1983 | 1993 |
| Kenya | 12 | 8 | 1974 | 1994 |
| Nigeria | 12 | 10 | 1985 | 2021 |
| Togo | 12 | 11 | 1974 | 2023 |
| Spain | 12 | 11 | 1977 | 2022 |
| Zambia | 11 | 2 | 1988 | 2011 |
| Guinea-Bissau | 10 | 5 | 1981 | 1994 |
| Guinea | 10 | 7 | 1981 | 1993 |
| Botswana | 9 | 7 | 1984 | 2019 |
| Morocco | 9 | 8 | 1984 | 2018 |
| Saint Vincent and the Grenadines | 9 | 9 | 1988 | 2023 |
| Republic of the Congo | 9 | 9 | 1984 | 2024 |
A state that speaks every year has more chances to use a word than one admitted in 2011, and a state whose statements are longer has more again. These are counts, not rates.