Desertification is the degradation of drylands. It involves the loss of biological or economic productivity and complexity in croplands, pastures, and woodlands. It is due mainly to climate variability and unsustainable human activities. The most commonly cited forms of unsustainable land use are overcultivation, overgrazing, deforestation, and poor irrigation practices. Seventy percent of the world's drylands (excluding hyper-arid deserts), or some 3,600 million hectares, are degraded. While drought is often associated with land degradation, it is a natural phenomenon that occurs when rainfall is significantly below normal recorded levels for a long time.

Drylands respond quickly to climatic fluctuations. By definition, drylands have limited freshwater supplies. Precipitation can vary greatly during the year. In addition to this seasonal variability, wide fluctuations occur over years and decades, frequently leading to drought. Over the ages, dryland ecology has become attuned to this variability in moisture; plants and animals can respond to it rapidly. For example, satellite imagery has shown that the vegetation boundary south of the Sahara can move by up to 200 km when a wet year is followed by a dry one, and vice versa.

People must also adjust to these natural fluctuations. The biological and economic resources of drylands, notably soil quality, freshwater supplies, vegetation, and crops, are easily damaged. People have learned to protect these resources with age-old strategies such as shifting agriculture and nomadic herding. However, in recent decades these strategies have become less practical due to changing economic and political circumstances, population growth, and a trend towards more settled communities. When land managers cannot or do not respond flexibly to climate variations, desertification is the result.

The relatively low priority given to environmental protection often leads to poor land management decisions. The overuse of land may result from specific economic conditions or from inappropriate land laws or customs. In many cases, unregulated access to land resources may lead some individuals to maximize their own gains by overexploiting the land at the expense of the community as a whole. Poor people, particularly poor women, often lack access to the best land, depending instead on the most fragile areas and resources. Their poverty may give them little alternative but to extract what they can from the scarce resources available to them, even though this degrades the land.

International economic forces can encourage people to overexploit their land. International trade patterns can lead to the short-term exploitation of local resources for export, leaving little profit at the community level for managing or restoring the land. Similarly, the development of an economy based on cash crops, or the imposition of taxes, can distort local markets and promote overexploitation of the land.

Ignorance, errors, and natural and man-made disasters can also contribute to land degradation. Ignorance of the natural environment played an important role in the US during the infamous Dust Bowl of the 1930s; among other errors, during a time of drought Midwestern farmers used ploughs better suited for the more temperate latitudes of Western Europe. In recent decades, similar mistakes in the choice of policies or technologies have led to land degradation in many countries, both developed and developing. Disasters such as wars and national emergencies also destroy productive land by displacing its managers or causing heavy concentrations of migrants to overburden an area. Natural disasters such as floods and droughts can have a similar effect.

What role do increasing populations and population densities play? It is tempting to conclude that an expanding human population is the ultimate driving force behind desertification. More people in an area inevitably exert a greater pressure on that area's resources; sometimes this pressure is indirect, as when growing urban populations place demands on food production in uncrowded rural areas. But the causes of desertification are complex, and the relationship between two variables such as population and desertification is not clear-cut. For example, a decline in population can result in desertification since there may no longer be enough people to manage the land adequately. Many hillside terraces in Yemen have fallen into disrepair with the exodus of labour to neighbouring oil-rich countries. Examples can also be cited of areas that support large concentrations of people without much degradation, such as around the city of Kano in Nigeria.

Desertification reduces the land's resilience to natural climate variability. Soil, vegetation, freshwater supplies, and other dryland resources tend to be resilient. They can eventually recover from climatic disturbances, such as drought, and even from human-induced impacts, such as overgrazing. When land is degraded, however, this resilience is greatly weakened. This has both physical and socio-economic consequences.

Soil becomes less productive. Exposed and eroded topsoil can be blown away by the wind or washed away by rainstorms. The soil's physical structure and bio-chemical composition can change for the worse. Gullies and cracks may appear and vital nutrients can be removed by wind or water. If the water table rises due to inadequate drainage and poor irrigation practices, the soil can become waterlogged, and salts may build up. When soil is trampled and compacted by cattle, it can lose its ability to support plant growth and to hold moisture, resulting in increased evaporation and surface run-off.

Vegetation becomes damaged. The loss of vegetation cover is both a consequence and a cause of land degradation. Loose soil can sandblast plants, bury them, or leave their roots dangerously exposed. When pastures are overgrazed by too many animals, or by inappropriate types, edible plant species may be lost, allowing inedible species to invade.

Some of the consequences are borne by people living outside the immediately affected area. Degraded land may cause downstream flooding, reduced water quality, sedimentation in rivers and lakes, and siltation of reservoirs and navigation channels. It can also cause dust storms and air pollution, resulting in damaged machinery, reduced visibility, unwanted sediment deposits, and mental stress. Wind-blown dust can also worsen health problems, including eye infections, respiratory illnesses, and allergies. Dramatic increases in the frequency of dust storms were recorded during the Dust Bowl years in the US, in the Virgin Lands scheme area in the former USSR in the 1950s, and in the African Sahel during the 1970s and 1980s.

Food production is undermined. Desertification is considered a major global environmental issue largely because of the link between dryland degradation and food production. A nutritionally adequate diet for the world's growing population implies tripling food production over the next 50 years. This will be difficult to achieve even under favourable circumstances. If desertification is not stopped and reversed, food yields in many affected areas will decline. Malnutrition, starvation, and ultimately famine may result. The relationship between soil degradation and crop yields, however, is seldom straightforward. Productivity is affected by many different factors, such as the weather, disease and pests, farming methods, and external markets and other economic forces.

Desertification contributes to famine. Famine typically occurs in areas that also suffer from poverty, civil unrest, or war. Drought and land degradation often help to trigger a crisis, which is then made worse by poor food distribution and the inability to buy what is available.

Desertification has enormous social costs. There is now increased awareness of the relationship between desertification, movements of people, and conflicts. In Africa, many people have become internally displaced or forced to migrate to other countries due to war, drought, and dryland degradation. The environmental resources in and around the cities and camps where these people settle come under severe pressure. Difficult living conditions and the loss of cultural identity further undermine social stability.

Desertification is a huge drain on economic resources. There is little detailed data on the economic losses resulting from desertification, although an unpublished World Bank study suggested that the depletion of natural resources in one Sahelian country was equivalent to 20% of its annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP). At the global level, it is estimated that the annual income foregone in the areas immediately affected by desertification amounts to approximately US$ 42 billion each year. The indirect economic and social costs suffered outside the affected areas, including the influx of "environmental refugees" and losses to national food production, may be much greater.

Return to Press Kits

Also see

What is Climate Change? What is Biodiversity? What is desertification?