Earth Policy News - The Earth is Shrinking: Advancing Deserts and Rising Seas

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At 01:29 PM 11/15/06, you wrote:

 

>Eco-Economy Update 2006-11

>For Immediate Release

>

>November 15, 2006

>

>THE EARTH IS SHRINKING

>Advancing Deserts and Rising Seas Squeezing Civilization

>

>http://www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update61.htm

>

>Lester R. Brown

>

>Our early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between

>advancing deserts and rising seas. Measured by the land area that can

>support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population

>densities, once generated solely by the addition of over 70 million people

>per year, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and the

>rise in sea level.

>

>The newly established trends of expanding deserts and rising seas are both

>of human origin. The former is primarily the result of overstocking

>grasslands and overplowing land. Rising seas result from temperature

>increases set in motion by carbon released from the burning of fossil fuels.

>

>The heavy losses of territory to advancing deserts in China and Nigeria,

>the most populous countries in Asia and Africa respectively, illustrate

>the trends for scores of other countries. China is not only losing

>productive land to deserts, but it is doing so at an accelerating rate.

> From 1950 to 1975 China lost an average of 600 square miles of land

>(1,560 square kilometers) to desert each year. By 2000, nearly 1,400

>square miles were going to desert annually.

>

>A U.S. Embassy report entitled " Desert Mergers and Acquisitions " describes

>satellite images that show two deserts in north-central China expanding

>and merging to form a single, larger desert overlapping Inner Mongolia and

>Gansu provinces. To the west in Xinjiang Province, two even larger

>deserts--the Taklimakan and Kumtag--are also heading for a merger. Further

>east, the Gobi Desert has marched to within 150 miles (241 kilometers) of

>Beijing, alarming China's leaders. Chinese scientists report that over the

>last half-century, some 24,000 villages in northern and western China were

>abandoned or partly depopulated as they were overrun by drifting sand.

>

>All the countries in central Asia--Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,

>Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan--are losing land to

>desertification. Kazakhstan, site of the vast Soviet Virgin Lands Project,

>has abandoned nearly half of its cropland since 1980.

>

>In Afghanistan, a country with a Canadian-sized population of 31 million,

>the Registan Desert is migrating westward, encroaching on agricultural

>areas. A U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) team reports that " up to 100

>villages have been submerged by windblown dust and sand. " In the country's

>northwest, sand dunes are moving onto agricultural land, their path

>cleared by the loss of stabilizing vegetation from firewood gathering and

>overgrazing. The UNEP team observed sand dunes nearly 50 feet (15 meters)

>high blocking roads, forcing residents to establish new routes.

>

>Iran, which has 70 million people and 80 million goats and sheep, the

>latter the source of wool for its fabled rug-making industry, is also

>losing its battle with the desert. Mohammad Jarian, who heads Iran's

>Anti-Desertification Organization, reported in 2002 that sand storms had

>buried 124 villages in the southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan,

>forcing their abandonment. Drifting sands had covered grazing areas,

>starving livestock and depriving villagers of their livelihood.

>

>Africa, too, is plagued with expanding deserts. In the north, the Sahara

>Desert is pushing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria

>northward toward the Mediterranean. In a desperate effort to halt the

>advancing Sahara, Algeria is geographically restructuring its agriculture,

>replacing grain in the south with orchards and vineyards.

>

>On the southern edge of the Sahara, in the vast east-to-west swath of

>semiarid Africa between the Sahara Desert and the forested regions to the

>south lies the Sahel--a semiarid region where herding and farming overlap.

>In countries from Senegal and Mauritania in the west to Sudan, Ethiopia,

>and Somalia in the east, the demands of growing human and livestock

>numbers are converting land into desert. (See data at

>www.earthpolicy.org/Updates/2006/Update61_data.htm.)

>

>Nigeria, slightly larger than Texas, is losing 1,355 square miles of

>rangeland and cropland to desertification each year. While Nigeria's human

>population was growing from 33 million in 1950 to 134 million in 2006, a

>fourfold expansion, its livestock population grew from 6 million to 66

>million, an 11-fold increase. With the food needs of its people forcing

>the plowing of marginal land and the forage needs of livestock exceeding

>the carrying capacity of its grasslands, the country is slowly turning to

>desert. Nigeria's fast-growing population is being squeezed into an

>ever-smaller area.

>

>In Latin America, deserts are expanding in both Brazil and Mexico. In

>Mexico, with a large share of arid and semiarid land, the degradation of

>cropland now forces some 700,000 Mexicans off the land each year in search

>of jobs in nearby cities or in the United States. In scores of countries,

>the growth in human and livestock numbers that drives desertification is

>continuing unabated.

>

>While deserts are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise

>to displace far greater numbers in the future given the concentration of

>the world's population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river

>deltas. During the twentieth century, sea level rose by 6 inches (15

>centimeters). In its 2001 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate

>Change projected that during this century seas would rise by 4 to 35

>inches. Since 2001, record-high temperatures have accelerated ice melting

>making it likely that the future rise in sea level will be even greater.

>

>The earth's rising temperature is raising sea level both through thermal

>expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets.

>Scientists are particularly concerned by the melting of the Greenland ice

>sheet, which has accelerated sharply in recent years. If this ice sheet, a

>mile thick in some places, were to melt entirely it would raise sea level

>by 23 feet, or 7 meters.

>

>Even a one-meter rise would inundate vast areas of low-lying coastal land,

>including many of the rice-growing river deltas and floodplains of India,

>Thailand, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and China. A World Bank map shows a

>one-meter rise in sea level inundating half of Bangladesh's riceland. Some

>30 million Bangladeshis would be forced to migrate, either internally or

>to other countries.

>

>Hundreds of cities, including some of the world's largest, would be at

>least partly inundated by a one-meter rise in sea level, including London,

>Alexandria, and Bangkok. More than a third of Shanghai, a city of 15

>million people, would be under water. A one-meter rise combined with a

>50-year storm surge would leave large portions of Lower Manhattan and the

>National Mall in Washington, D.C., flooded with seawater.

>

>If the Greenland ice sheet should melt, the resulting 23-foot rise in sea

>level would force the abandonment of thousands of coastal cities and

>communities. Hundreds of millions of coastal residents would be forced to

>migrate inland or to other countries, spawning conflicts over land and

>living space. Together, rising seas and desertification will present the

>world with an unprecedented flow of environmental refugees--and the

>potential for civil strife.

>

>During this century we must deal with the effects of the trends--rapid

>population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas--that we set in

>motion during the last century. Growth in the human population of over 70

>million per year is accompanied by a simultaneous growth of livestock

>populations of more than 35 million per year. The rising atmospheric

>concentrations of carbon dioxide that are destabilizing the earth's

>climate are driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Our choice is a simple

>one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.

>

># # #

>

>Lester R. Brown is President of the Earth Policy Institute and author of

>Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

>

>Data and additional resources at www.earthpolicy.org

>

>For more in-depth information see Chapters 4-6 in Plan B 2.0, at

>www.earthpolicy.org/Books/PB2/Contents.htm

>

>For reprint permission contact rjk (at) earthpolicy.org

>

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