World's dry regions set to expandBBC News
Friday, 17 June, 2005
SourceDesertification is a growing menace that puts at risk global efforts to tackle poverty and hunger, a new report from a coalition of scientists states.The group says bad crop management and the misuse of irrigation in a number of regions is putting unsustainable pressure on dryland areas.
The UN-led team estimates that 10-20% of drylands are already degraded.
They warn that unless practices change these areas will become unproductive, blighting the lives of millions.
Their report is called Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Desertification Synthesis. It is the latest document produced by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) project.
This $22m, four-year study by 1,300 experts from 95 countries has been described as the most detailed "green healthcheck" yet on the state of the planet.
In the case of drylands, preventing their degradation into deserts is an immense global problem, say the authors.
"Given the size of population in drylands, the number of people affected by desertification is likely larger than any other contemporary environmental problem," they write.
Dust stormsDrylands cover 41% of the planet's land surface, and are growing. They are home to over two billion people, including the world's most impoverished, in areas such as central Asia and northern Africa.
One of the biggest problems is that as land dries up, it becomes unsuitable for farming. This exacerbates poverty and creates environmental refugees.
The authors estimate that hundreds of thousands of people will be in need of new homes and lifestyles over the next 30 years as the Earth dries up.
The effects are also felt far beyond the desert areas themselves. Dust storms from the Gobi Desert in Asia and the African Sahara are responsible for respiratory problems as far away as North America, says the report.
Co-author Professor Uriel Safriel, of Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says population pressure and bad land management practices are the cause of degradation.
"The process of desertification starts from direct impact of people by transforming range lands to cultivated lands that cannot be covered by protective vegetation cover during the whole year," he told BBC News.
"In the dry season, they become bare, their soil then is not protected from the wind or from floods and erodes or becomes dust."
Better management of crops, more careful irrigation and strategies to provide non-farming jobs for people living in drylands could help address the problem. But it is easier to prevent desertification than to reverse it, says the report.
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Growing deserts 'a global problem'CNN
Saturday, June 18, 2005
Source(CNN) --
Millions of people could lose their homes and livelihoods as the world's deserts expand because of climate change and unsustainable human activities, an environmental report warned on Friday.The report, part of a series examining the state of the world's biological resources, was released on the eve of "World Day to Combat Desertifcation," which marks the 11th anniversary of a UN agreement to tackle spreading deserts.
But Zafar Adeel of the United Nations University International Network on Water, Environment and Health, an expert on water management and a leading author of the report, warned that more needed to be done to combat desertification.
"Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone," said Adeel. "There are serious gaps in our understanding of how big deserts are, and how they are growing."
Drylands, which range from "dry sub-humid" to "hyper-arid" regions, make up more than 40 percent of the world's land surface and are home to two billion people. The largest area stretches from Saharan Africa across the Middle East and Central Asia into parts of China.
Most of Australia is also classified as drylands, along with much of the western U.S., parts of southern Africa, and patches of desert in South America.
The report said that that up to 20 percent of those areas had already suffered some loss of plant life or economic use as a consequence of desertification.
It said that global warming was likely to exacerbate the problem, causing more droughts, heat waves and floods.
But human factors have also played their part, with over-grazing, over-farming, misuse of irrigation and the unsustainable demands of a growing population all contributing to environmental degradation.
Adeel warned that some of the world's poorest populations were likely to be among the worst affected, with large swathes of Central Asia and the areas to the north and south of the Sahara in danger of becoming unsuitable for farming.
"Without strong efforts to reverse desertification, some of the gains we've seen in development in these regions may be reversed," he said.
Desertification has also been linked to health problems caused by dust storms, poverty and a drop in farm production, with infant mortality in drylands double the rate elsewhere in developing nations.
But the problem causes dangerous changes to the environment on a global scale, the report warned, with dust storms in the Gobi and Sahara deserts blamed for respiratory problems in North America and damage to coral reefs in the Caribbean. Scientists estimate that a billion tons of dust from the Sahara are lifted into the atmosphere each year.
While very difficult to reverse, the report said that specific local strategies should be employed to tackle spreading deserts. Alternative livelihoods such as ecotourism and fish farming could provide an alternative to intensive crop farming, while better management of crops and irrigation and the adoption of alternative energy sources such as solar power would all contribute to environmental sustainability.
The first Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report, released in March, warned that approximately 60 percent of the ecosystem supporting life on Earth was being degraded or used unsustainably and that the consequences of degradation could grow significantly worse in the next half century.