First The Desert Came For the Poor, Then It Came For Me

Say adios to Spain…and lots of other places, too.

According to a recently released report from the United Nations, the deserts of Africa are poised to jump the Mediterranean and up to a third of Spain could soon become desert. Global warming, as well as overgrazing, bad irrigation practices and unchecked building development along the coasts are being blamed.

More than 90% of land bordering the Mediterranean from Almeria in the south to Tarragona in the north is considered to be at high risk. But that figure climbs to almost 100% in Alicante and Murcia.

Age is reporting, “After the poorest winter rain in 60 years, the capacity of Spanish rivers has fallen by 41 per cent. In Almanzora, in the south-east, long considered the "garden of Europe" for its prolific olive groves and vegetable crops, the reservoirs are dry. It has not rained in 15 years.”

A recent editorial in the conservative ABC newspaper put the implications in simple terms. "If things continue like this, we won't need to go to Africa to enjoy the tranquility of the desert. We can just go to the Canary Islands, Valencia or Murcia."

And while the country dries up, in Madrid alone, the capital's 28 golf courses use as much water in a day as a city of 100,000.

And on the other side of the globe, a remote sensing survey has shown that the desert area of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, also called the roof of the world, has dramatically increased over the past three decades. The desert areas looked at are mainly in the northern Tibet Plateau, basins in southern Tibet including the upper and middle reaches of Yarlung Zangbo River and its major branches including the lower reaches of Nyangqu River, Lhasa River and Nyang River, and the Qaidam Basin, Gonghe Basin and Qinghai Lake areas.

Salinized soil covers 79,373 sq km, about three percent of the region's total area, and approximately 20,069 sq km or 20.2 percent less than in the 1970s. The disappeared salinized land was believed to have turned into desert, according to experts.

Grassland on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has also decreased. Grassland shrank to 43,742 sq km in 2002 from 57,814 sq km in the 1970s, down about 14,072 sq km or 24.3 percent from the 1970s. Experts ascribed the grassland reduction to desert expansion. Who’d of thunk it?

Those same experts have concluded global warming has caused less rainfall in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau which has degraded the environment in the area. Increased human activities are also blamed for the environmental changes.

Xinhua reports due to its special geological structure, the "roof of the world" is vulnerable to environmental changes and each environmental index change in the area will inevitably be followed by world climate and environmental changes.

But why stop there.

Research presented recently in the journal Science says that global warming could be spreading desert like conditions out from Africa’s southern sand dune systems destroying the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of people.

Large parts of interior southern Africa stretching from northern South Africa to Angola, Zambia and beyond are made up of stabilized sand dunes. They are at least partially covered in vegetation and support a growing population of herders and farmers.

But the new research predicts widespread reactivation of these dunes as average rainfall declines, droughts increase and wind strengths pick up in the coming decades — something last seen 14 000-16 000 years ago.

The study conducted by British-based researchers David Thomas, Giles Wiggs and Melanie Knight considered a number of different climate and emissions scenarios. "By the time you get to 2070, regardless of the model used, you get a landscape that is more desert-like than today," Thomas said in a telephone interview reported in the Mail and Guardian. "Life will potentially be very difficult."

The movement of dunes is driven by two key environmental factors: wind strength and the dunes' susceptibility to erosion, which in turn is influenced by the level of rain fall and vegetation cover.

Based on observed dune activity over 20 years of fieldwork in the Kalahari region, the team was able to simulate how three dune fields would respond to different climate scenarios and a range of possible emission levels, Thomas said.

There are widespread predictions that the coming decades will see increased drought and wind in this region, accompanied by an overall decline in rainfall, though punctuated with incidents of extreme rainfall in some areas.

But even if moisture levels increase, it will be balanced by heightened evaporation as temperatures get warmer, and the dune fields will progressively become exposed and start moving, Thomas argued.

The researchers predict this would happen first — possibly as soon as 2039 — in the southern, driest areas and spread progressively northward, reaching into northern Botswana, eastern Namibia and western Zimbabwe and western Zambia by 2069.

"This is a very important [the above study] that shows how currently semi-arid area may respond to global warming," said Nicholas Lancaster, a research professor at the Division of Earth and Ecosystem Sciences at the Desert Research Institute, based in Reno, Nevada. "The implications for southern Africa are huge—especially for cattle herders, wildlife, and tourism," Lancaster added.

I guess.

The problem of world wide desertification threatens to send millions of people fleeing for “greener pastures.

The UN says one-third of the Earth's surface is at risk.

"It's a creeping catastrophe," said Michel Smitall, a spokesman for the U.N. secretariat that oversees the 1994 accord (Convention to Combat Desertification). "Entire parts of the world might become uninhabitable."

"Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone," said Zafar Adeel, assistant director of the UN University's water academy. Two billion people live in drylands vulnerable to desertification, ranging from northern Africa to swathes of central Asia, he said.

And desertification means increasing health problems linked to dust, reduced farm production and poverty according to an extensive UN study.

Infant mortality in drylands in developing nations averaged 54 children per 1000 live births in 2000, double the rate in other poor regions and 10 times the rate in industrial nations.

"An increase in desertification-related dust storms is widely considered to be a cause of ill-health - fever, coughing, sore eyes - during the dry season," it said.

And dust from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia could affect people as far away as Japan or Hawaii. Some scientists estimate that a billion tons of dust can be lifted from the Sahara region into the atmosphere every year.

Dust particles can also carry bacteria and fungi. Dust-borne microorganisms from Africa were believed to have damaged coral reefs in the Caribbean.

"Bedouins in Israel are known to be infected by spores of fungi and bacteria transported by dust," he said.

Some dust carries toxins like pesticides from around the Aral Sea.

And dust storms from Africa can damage plants' ability to grow as far away as Florida by muting the sunlight.

And the poorest countries where food is scarcest will find it increasingly difficult to feed themselves as global warming exacerbates desertification and drought.

"Climate change will have a tremendous impact on food security, especially in Africa and also in some parts of Asia and Latin America," said Wulf Killmann who chairs the Inter-Departmental Working Group on Biological Diversity in Food and Agriculture of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

And, of course, adds Killmann, "Those who are already suffering from hunger will be suffering even more." Sources: Water Conserve, Age (Australia), Xinhua, Guardian, Mail and Guardian (South Africa), National Geographic, Salt Lake Tribune, Australian, Reuters