What does the term desertification refers to?
The United Nations’ official definition says desertification is land degradation in typically dry areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities. Many things can cause desertification. Drought, overgrazing, fire, and deforestation can thin out vegetation, leaving exposed soil.
What is the desertification process?
Desertification is a process of continuous, gradual ecosystem degradation, during which plants and animals, and geological resources such as water and soil, are stressed beyond their ability to adjust to changing conditions.
What does increasing desertification mean?
Desertification is a type of land degradation in drylands in which biological productivity is lost due to natural processes or induced by human activities whereby fertile areas become increasingly arid.
What is the importance of desertification?
Desertification diminishes biological diversity, a diversity which contributes to many of the services provided to humans by dryland ecosystems. Vegetation and its diversity are key for soil conservation and for the regulation of surface water and local climate.
What is the impact of desertification?
A major effect of desertification is the decrease in crop yields. Once land turns from arable to arid, it is often on longer suitable for farming purposes anymore. In turn, many farmers may lose their livelihood, since they often solely rely on farming as their single source of income.
What do you understand by desertification Support your answer with relevant examples?
Desertification is the degradation process by which a fertile land changes itself into a desert by losing its flora and fauna, this can be caused by drought, deforestation, climate change, human activities or improper agriculture. Desertification is a process of degradation of the land.
What are the control of desertification?
1. Afforestation and planting of soil binding grasses can check soil erosion, floods and water logging. 2. Crop rotation and mixed cropping improve the fertility of the soil.
What is desertification give two reasons for it?
‘Climatic variations’ and ‘Human activities’ can be regarded as the two main causes of desertification. removal of the natural vegetation cover（by taking too much fuel wood）, agricultural activities in the vulnerable ecosystems of arid and semi-arid areas, which are thus strained beyond their capacity.
Why are drylands important?
Low precipitation and prolonged dry seasons in drylands can lead to water scarcity, and limit agricultural productivity and output. Drylands biodiversity maintains soil fertility and moisture to ensure agricultural growth, and reduces the risk of drought and other environmental hazards.
How can desertification impact your life?
Land degradation and desertification can affect human health through complex pathways. As land is degraded and deserts expand in some places, food production is reduced, water sources dry up and populations are pressured to move to more hospitable areas. the spread of infectious diseases as populations migrate.
What are three effects of desertification?
Devastating Effects of Desertification
- Farming becomes next to impossible. If an area becomes a desert, then it’s almost impossible to grow substantial crops there without special technologies.
- Decrease in Crop Yields.
- Hunger.
- Flooding.
- Poor Water Quality.
- Overpopulation.
- Poverty.
- Biodiversity Loss.
What is desertification and how can we solve it?
Desertification is the persistent degradation of dryland ecosystems by variations in climate and human activities. These drylands are home to over a third of the entire human population and they occupy nearly half of Earth’s land area.
What is the u.n.convention to combat desertification?
The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) defines it as “land degradation in arid, semiarid and dry subhumid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities.” Land degradation is in turn defined as the reduction or loss of the biological or economic productivity of drylands.
How many people are at risk of desertification?
About 1.2 billion people are at risk from desertification as deserts expand and degraded drylands cover close to a third of the world’s land surface area, the United Nations estimates. As per the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the rate of desertification is speeding up.
How does Overfarming and drought cause desertification?
Overfarming or drought can change the soil so that rain no longer penetrates, and the plants lose the water they need to grow. If the changing force is lifted—drought ends or cattle are removed, for example—but the land cannot recover, it is desertified.
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