Causes and Impacts of Desertification in the World

Abstract

The causes and repercussions of desertification worldwide vary in type, origin, degree, and scope. As for the origin, desertification can depend on physical or human factors. Its magnitude corresponds to the degree of intensity of the phenomenon and its related effects. Comprehensiveness has to do with its scale and scope. The leading causes of desertification are (1) traditional agriculture, undercapitalized and with a low technological level; (2) irrigated agriculture, capital intensive but poorly managed; and (3) contingencies of climate change and extreme events. Among the leading causes of desertification in non-irrigated areas in the world are population growth and lack of associated policies; income concentration and social exclusion; increase in livestock; overgrazing of cultivated native pastures and agricultural use by crops; fundamental sanitation problems and irrational farming techniques; and plant and mineral extraction. Soil salinization is the primary agent causing this problem in areas with irrigated agriculture. Moreover, the consequences of climate change represent the contingencies of intensive use of natural resources and the non-neutrality of CO₂ emissions—elements that cause environmental degradation and desertification. Structural factors, however, such as income concentration and inadequacy of some economic, cultural, and technological activities to environmental conditions, make it difficult to contend with desertification and magnify the effects of the causes above, commonly in a social context where poverty is marked. In this way, more than climatic vicissitudes, human interference in the biophysical environment causes a rupture in the dynamics of landscapes, mainly due to the degradation of vegetation and biological and climato-hydrological elements.