REPORT19

A desert is a place on Earth that gets less than ten inches of rainfall every year. The Sahara Desert has an area of about 9,065,000 square kilometers, over 10 countries. And it’s getting bigger. Desertification, or the turning of arable land (land able to be used for grazing or agriculture), into deserts, now threatens 35 percent of the Earth, mainly in areas near existing deserts. Every year, approximately 12 million hectares of arable land becomes useless for cultivation. And so far, the area of deserts as increased by an entire 17 percent. And the biggest threat is to the areas right next to the deserts, where there are extremely delicate ecosystems.

Desertification can be a natural process, but its recent acceleration is quite startling, with South Africa losing 300-400 metric tons of topsoil every year, and in the near future possibly an increase the area of desert climates by 17 percent. The cause of this acceleration, is, you guessed it, humans. The main problem is erosion. Erosion is displacement of dirt, usually topsoil, where crops are planted, usually by wind, water, ice, gravity, or by living organisms (in the case of bioerosion). But humans, (obviously) have been the major player in the growing problem of erosion. By chopping down trees for firewood and building materials, and the uprooting of other pants for other reasons, has caused a massive increase of erosion. Plants naturally stop erosion by holding soil in place, but without then, soil just blows away, leaving the land barren, and completely useless to everything.

One of the biggest causes of erosion is because of overgrazing. Grazing is when livestock are allowed to eat grass and other native plants for food. That isn’t that much of a problem. Overgrazing, however, is when livestock, usually cattle, are allowed to eat too much. This totally rids the land of plants, and erosion does the rest. But why don’t people just graze less and have less cows? Because of the growing world population, there is a higher demand for food than ever before. So to feed these people, we need more food, and also with a growing middle class in developing countries, and China, there are also more people who can now suddenly afford meat, so more and more cows are grown, which need more and more food, which means more and more grazing and less plants and more and more erosion. Other, smaller causes are the introduction of new species that need more water, and mining. As global trade increases, there is also the “stowing away” of small animals on ships and planes, and if those species need more water than the old species, then the new species drink the water, and leaves less for plants, which die, and lets the desert sweep in. Mining, well, undermines the land and takes away from its general stability, allowing nutrient rich topsoil to be blown away with the wind.

But the process of desertification can be halted. As stated earlier, the destruction of plants leads to erosion, which leads to deserts. As such, one of the simplest ways to halt desertification is planting plants. The Chinese began a program to build a buffer zone of trees and shrubs along the ever-growing Gobi Desert. After 10 years, the forest buffer covered about 19,748,000 acres. Farmers have had success in growing wheat in the protected area. The cost of planting the forest buffer was small compared to other attempts to turn back desert advances. The Chinese spent only $600,000 to create the forest buffer. Other efforts to stop deserts have cost billions and have been less effective. Also, “sand fences” have been made to literally be a wall to stop sand for ruining arable land.

But as the number of people on Earth grows, it becomes a harder and harder problem to combat, because more people need more land and more food and more firewood, and the countries with the highest population growth are in developing countries and unfortunately, are near deserts, and because they’re developing, they are also very unstable government and are unable to or don’t care about the growing deserts.

So, in conclusion, desertification is a really big problem, but it can easily be combated by planting trees, but unfortunately, it is only one problem on a huge list of global problems, but we can solve these problems, one at a time.