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Desertifying deserts

Nature Sustainability volume 3, pages 572–575 (2020)Cite this article

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The current definition of desertification excludes hyper-arid zones given their lack of economic activity. However, the 101 million people living there, ongoing land degradation associated with the use of groundwater for intensive agriculture and climate-change-induced aridity call for a revision of this definition.

The United Nations (UN) Decade for Deserts and the Fight against Desertification comes to an end in 2020. Although deserts and desertification tend to go hand in hand in the public imagination, it is important to clarify their differences. Deserts are mature ecosystems with very low productivity due to severe water limitations promoted by low rainfall and high evapotranspiration levels, and have evolved under this state over a long period1. Desertification deprives land of its capacity to support life and to provide essential ecosystem services to human populations, leading to displacement of populations. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines desertification as “land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors including climatic variation and human activity”2. This definition, widely used by scientists and policy makers alike, circumscribes the problem to those territories where the aridity index (AI) — the ratio between mean annual precipitation and mean annual potential evapotranspiration — is between 0.05 and 0.65, roughly 31% of Earth’s surface3. Land degradation in drylands is a key environmental problem that compromises the livelihoods of more than one billion people globally, mainly in developing countries4.

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Fig. 1: Hyper-arid areas of the world and groundwater bodies in the Middle East.
Fig. 2: Resource production, importation and groundwater use in Saudi Arabia from 1960–201711,16.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the European Research Council grant agreement no. 647038 (BIODESERT). F.T.M. acknowledges support from Generalitat Valenciana (CIDEGENT/2018/041). The authors would like to thank D. J. Eldridge for his valuable comments and revisions of the text.

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  1. Instituto Multidisciplinar para el Estudio del Medio “Ramón Margalef”, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Jaime Martínez-Valderrama, Emilio Guirado & Fernando T. Maestre

  2. Departamento de Ecología, Universidad de Alicante, Alicante, Spain

    Fernando T. Maestre

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  1. Jaime Martínez-Valderrama
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Correspondence to Jaime Martínez-Valderrama.

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Martínez-Valderrama, J., Guirado, E. & Maestre, F.T. Desertifying deserts. Nat Sustain 3, 572–575 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0561-2

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