Desertification is, “land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities”. … Desertification processes affect about 46% of Africa.
What is causing desertification in Africa?
Poverty-related agricultural practices are a major contributor to desertification. Continuous cultivation without adding supplements, overgrazing, lack of soil and water conservation structures, and indiscriminate bushfires aggravate the process of desertification.
What is desertification explain?
Desertification refers to the persistent degradation of dryland ecosystems by climatic variations and human activities. … Desertification occurs as a result of a long-term failure to balance human demand for ecosystem services and the amount the ecosystem can supply.
Where is desertification in Africa?
Desertification in Africa
More specifically, desertification plays its largest role in the grasslands of East Africa, the Kalahari Desert and the Sahara Desert. These regions span over 65 percent of the land. In Ethiopia, 80 percent of the land is at risk of desertification.
What are three effects of desertification in Africa?
Desertification affects topsoil, groundwater reserves, surface runoff, human, animal, and plant populations. Water scarcity in drylands limits the production of wood, crops, forage, and other services that ecosystems provide to our community.
How can we stop desertification in Africa?
6.2 What actions can be taken to prevent desertification?
- Integrating land and water management to protect soils from erosion, salinization, and other forms of degradation.
- Protecting the vegetative cover, which can be a major instrument for soil conservation against wind and water erosion.
What countries in Africa are affected by desertification?
This situation is acute in Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Kenya, where the combination of weak governments and a lack of annual rains linked to climate change are driving desertification levels.
What happens during desertification?
The UN has defined desertification as a “diminution or destruction of the biological potential of the land which can lead ultimately to desert-like conditions.” Desertification can occur when extended periods of drought in arid, semi-arid, or dry sub-humid areas — known as drylands — sap the land’s productivity until …
What is the importance of desertification?
Vegetation and its diversity are key for soil conservation and for the regulation of surface water and local climate. Desertification also contributes to global climate change by releasing to the atmosphere carbon stored in dryland vegetation and soils.
How can desertification affect humans?
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.
Where the risk of drought is in Africa?
Based on exposure measured as a function of the density of agricultural production per square kilometer, the risks associated with drought are greatest in southwestern Ethiopia and western Kenya.
How does desertification affect wildlife?
Plants, animals and other organisms that live in deserts have evolved to survive harsh conditions, scarce water and barren landscapes. … This desertification is exacerbated by human exploitation of ecosystems that border deserts, causing land degradation, soil erosion and sterility, and a loss of biodiversity.
Where is the risk of droughts and desertification is in Africa?
While recurrent droughts are a common feature throughout most of the drylands in Africa, three distinct areas have been identified as most at risk: Mediterranean Africa, the Sudano-Sahelian region and the Kalahari-Namib region in southern Africa.
What are the causes and effects of desertification in Africa?
The region currently faces extensive desertification caused by numerous factors. These factors include very high birth rates and thus expansion of agriculture into unsuitable areas, uncontrolled tree cutting for a fuel, all connected with effects of climate change and bad government policies.