Drought and Rapidly Growing Deserts an increasingly widespread problem
Pastor Dale Morgan
Drought and Rapidly Growing Deserts an increasingly widespread problem*
World Desertification Day Puts Spotlight On Neglected Crisis
By 2025, Africa could lose as much as two-thirds of its arable land
compared with 1990, and there could be declines of one-third in Asia and
one-fifth in South America, it says. Migration -- from the Sahelian
regions to the West African coast, from sub-Saharan Africa to Europe,
from Mexico to the United States -- will be an inevitable consequence as
poor people are driven off their land.
Spain hosts drought forum
Madrid (AFP) June 17 - Spain's environment ministry Sunday opened an
international forum on drought in the southern city of Seville which
organisers said was designed to raise awareness of an increasingly
widespread problem. Francisco Tapia, chairman of the hydrographic
confederation of the Guadalquivir river which runs through Seville noted
the city had, like much of the rest of central and southern Spain,
experienced serious water shortages in recent years. On behalf of
developing nations attending the four-day gathering, former Mali
minister of culture and UN Development Programme coordinator Aminata
Traore called on the developed world to avoid dumping the "injustices"
of globalisation on Africa and understand why many Africans were
determined to immigrate to Europe. Traore warned that simply sending
immigrants home would not effectively address the problem as on
returning home they would find "the same poverty and shortage of water"
that had driven them to seek a new life in the first place. And she
criticised developed societies for a consumer-orientated lifestyle which
he said was using up scarce resources and speeding up climate change,
bringing desertification and drought to Africa and beyond.
by Anne Chaon
Paris (AFP) June 15, 2007
The United Nations on Sunday sounds a loud alarm about desertification,
warning that global warming is helping to drive the onward march of
parched land and, in years to come, millions of people could be driven
from their homes. Of six billion humans, nearly a fifth are threatened
directly or indirectly by desertification, experts warn ahead of the
UN's annual World Day to Combat Desertification.
China, India, Pakistan, Central Asia, the Middle East, as well as a
major part of Africa and swathes of Argentina, Brazil and Chile are in
the front line of this unacknowledged crisis.
Desertification does not necessarily mean the advance of the desert,
which is typically conveyed by dramatic images of wind-blown sand
overwhelming farms on the fringes of the Sahara and Gobi.
A subtler, yet bigger, problem is degradation which hits so-called
drylands -- areas with low rainfall and high evaporation that account
for more than 40 percent of Earth's cultivated surface.
These vulnerable lands are progressively at risk of overgrazing,
deforestation and other forms of exploitation, to which climate change
is now a powerful addition.
In April, the UN's top scientific authority on global warming warned
that higher global temperatures could have brutal effects on rainfall
patterns, runoff from snowmelt and river flows in scores of countries
that already battle water stress.
Between 80 and 200 million more people could be at risk of hunger by
2080, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimated.
Some 70 percent of Earth's 5.2 billion hectares (13 billion acres) of
agricultural drylands "are already degraded and threatened by
desertification," says the UN Convention to Combat Desertification
(UNCCD), which hosts Sunday's commemorative day.
By 2025, Africa could lose as much as two-thirds of its arable land
compared with 1990, and there could be declines of one-third in Asia and
one-fifth in South America, it says.
Migration -- from the Sahelian regions to the West African coast, from
sub-Saharan Africa to Europe, from Mexico to the United States -- will
be an inevitable consequence as poor people are driven off their land.
As many as 135 million are at risk of being displaced, says the UNCCD.
Desertification is "a forgotten emergency," says SOS-Sahel, a
non-governmental organisation (NGO) which lobbies for Saharan countries.
But it is not exclusive to poor countries.
Severe droughts and water depletion in the United States have left
nearly a third of US land affected by desertification, a figure that is
also applicable for Spain, whose south has been afflicted by successive
dry summers, as well as reckless development and water use.
Marc Bied-Charreton, chairman of the French Scientific Committee on
Desertification, says that the direct costs of desertification are
around 60 billion dollars per year, a tally that does not take into
account economic migration and other phenomena.
Despite its obvious threat factor, desertification is failing to gain
traction as an issue, he complains.
"The Global Environment Facility [GEF] is starting to make a small
effort. It has committed 200 million dollars over four years," notes
Bied-Charreton. "By comparison, at meeting last December with economists
and the World Bank, we concluded that 10 billion dollars a year is
needed over the next decade to restore all the fertility in degraded land."
Bied-Charreton says that, with money and effort, desertification can be
reversed in all but five percent of cases.
"It entails replanting over three to four years, at an annual cost of
around 300-400 euros per hectare (160-212 dollars per acre), to limit
erosion and encourage water penetration in the soil," he says.
"This is often hard, manual work which has to be carried out over large
areas, and you have to persevere, for up to a decade, to progressively
win back your land. But Nature is incredibly strong and these ecosystems
are fundamentally resilient."
Source: Agence France-Presse