[Vision2020] Fwd: Earth Policy News - The Earth is Shrinking: Advancing Deserts and Rising Seas

[Tom Trail]

>Visionaires:  Here is a thought provoking report by Lester R. Brown, President

of Earth Policy Institute.

Tom Trail

>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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-- 
Dr. Tom Trail
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