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Curzon
Author

Curzon

Date

February 3rd, 2009

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Desertification Revisited

Desertification is increasingly recognized as a major problem for developing countries, especially in Africa. According to the UNU’s Ghana-based Institute for Natural Resources in Africa, if current trends of soil degradation continue on the continent, it might be able to feed just 25% of its population by 2025.

But desertification is a phenomenon where the science is not well understood. The phenomenon of increased folliage in an increasingly populated area is addressed in a current article titled “Desertification? Northern Ethiopia re-photographed after 140 years”, published in Science of the Total Environment. In the article, photographs taken during Great Britain’s military expedition to Abyssinia in 1868, the oldest landscape photographs from northern Ethiopia, are compared against the situation today, and the solid recovery in vegetation is discussed and reviewed.

Thirteen repeat landscape photographs, taken during the dry seasons of 1868 and 2008, were analyzed for various environmental indicators and show a significant improvement in vegetation cover.

desertification

This is all despite a ten-fold increase in population density

Conclusion: Even in a highly degraded environment with high and increasing pressures on the land to produce, rural communities can successfully improve land husbandry.

Comments to this entry

Roy Berman
February 3, 2009
10:41 am
What does it say about how they managed to improve the land? Is it due to changes in human behavior, or due to climate change in one of the lucky areas?
Machiavelli's Cat
February 3, 2009
3:55 pm
Or random patterns of rainfall? Way too little information to be useful - all the variables have to be accounted for before any sort of analysis can even be attempted in such a complex subject matter.
Stephen Klaber
February 4, 2009
2:44 pm
Desertification has multiple causes. One of the main ones is aquatic weeds. All across Africa, there are thousands of square miles of these weeds. Typha Australis, in particular, clogs the Lake Chad basin and numerous other waterways. These are dessication machines. Their presence is in some places anthropogenic (we make dams and such). Their removal would largely stop the process. And with Typha and perhaps some of the others, this can be done at a profit in food and fuel. And a profit will be needed, because to clear these weeds is a never ending task. Consider the corner the government of Chad has painted itself into. It could be resolved by using half their military to harvest cattails (typha) and make it into charcoal. In the process they would restore their streams and aquifers.
Alfred Russel Wallace
February 7, 2009
2:14 am
Roy asks an interesting question, and the Cat replies, which shows how keen we all are to find 'answers' - even when there is so little information. But I would urge readers to reflect that if the pictures were reversed, we would all be sure it was due to climate change! The message I take is that the world is always changing... In this case, a major influence is that people no longer need, or are allowed (?) to take firewood....
Roy Berman
February 9, 2009
3:54 am
It's certainly worth remembering that even if the worst case scenarios about greenhouse gas related climate change are true, there are still many, many other factors at work in climate change, particularly at a local level such as seen in these photos. Rise in sea level: likely to be due to CO2/methane emissions. Re-greening of a section of Northern Ethiopia: at least as likely to be due to something like a ban on firewood collection or grazing of goats.