Written by Luca Pascolo - Editor: Anastasia Eginoglou
Let’s start off this week’s GreenNote episode with a fun little game: Which country comes to your mind when you hear the term “desertification”? For the majority of people, myself included, the focus shifts immediately to the vast dunes of the Sahara desert in Northern Africa or the captivating rocky shrubland of Death Valley, respectively. What is much less known, however, is that the phenomenon of desertification is happening very close to Europe, too and is expected to spread in the coming decades.
Large portions of Spain and Italy, for example, have seen dramatic increases in the rates of desertification in the areas to the south of the country. This is largely driven by human factors but will be made worse by climate change.
In this week’s instalment, we will understand the causes of desertification, the areas most affected by it in Europe, and what is being done to fight it.
According to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), a UN entity established to formally and legally deal with the issue of desertification, it is:
“Land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities”.
Contrary to what some people may think, this term refers to a decline in the soil’s properties that support life on Earth rather than a literal progressive expansion of a desert. Desertified lands, in fact, suffer from fertility degradation through a loss of nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and soil erosion through which the soil’s surface layers are removed by wind, rain or human activities. Around 50% of the surface in the EU is somewhat sensitive to desertification, covering the countries in South and East Europe, including Spain, Portugal and Italy, as well as Greece, Romania and Bulgaria. South Europe is particularly prone to this risk due to its proximity to the Sahara desert, which begins in Africa and expands northwards into the old continent.
Globally, this process is driven by man-made changes to the soil: the main processes include impermeabilization as a result of laying concrete roads and building foundations, land management, fires and intensive agriculture.
Climate change can speed up the existing process through an increased frequency of extreme weather events. Droughts and heatwaves, which naturally occur in summer periods in Mediterranean regions and are expected to become more severe in the coming years, limit the region’s vegetation and water availability, worsening desertification. High winds, formed by differences in atmospheric pressure, remove topsoil and sediments, transporting the material over long distances and reducing its resilience to external forces.
Wherever desertification occurs, then by definition, agricultural production cannot exist. This is a worrying issue for European countries whose economic output relies on this industry. This is quite ironic given that this process of land degradation in Europe is largely driven by intensive agriculture, often paired with excessive use of fertilisers and overexploitation of underground water resources.
The Almeria region, situated in the south of Spain, represents an important agriculture hotspot in Europe. Advertised primarily as a tourist destination on government websites, the region holds over 40.000 hectares of greenhouses (visible from space, may I add), roughly half of the country’s total greenhouse cultivation, housing over 400 companies and capable of producing as much as 1.8 million tonnes of food in a single agricultural season.
This system relies on the extraction of water from underwater aquifers in order to sustain the massive export of fruits and vegetables, resulting in the decline of the water table and quality, thus increasing the risk of desertification in the region. The region has just recently suffered one of its worst droughts, with some local municipalities setting a limit on water consumption for its residents, highlighting how close the issue really is.
In Italy, we also witness similar patterns. Unsustainable agriculture is characterised by the contamination of water sources and the use of heavy machinery and fertilisers that damage the soils, hitting the hardest in the southern regions of Sicily. This, however, leads to another social impact of desertification: climate refugees. People will want to move if the land they live on becomes arid and with a lower agricultural yield, and therefore grimmer prospects for social and economic stability.
Sociology Professor Roberto Poli (University of Trento) has commented on the idea of a double desertification process that may soon plague the Italian peninsula, combining the effects of soil degradation with the diminishing population in the south of the country. According to the professor, this may quite literally break the country in two, creating two different governmental entities akin to the case of Czechoslovakia.
If, on one hand, agricultural activity on an industrial scale can significantly contribute to the issue of desertification, then by the same token, a more sustainable farming approach can mitigate it, namely through regenerative agriculture.
Regenerative agriculture is an innovative take on traditional farming techniques and focuses on using processes that are friendly to the soil and the surrounding biodiversity. Some examples are reduced soil tilling to minimise loss of carbon dioxide, the rotation of plantation crops and the use of animal manure to replenish the ground’s nutrient content. This approach can present a real chance to protect the soil’s health and slow down the rate of desertification while helping satisfy the demand for food.
Some farmers in Southern Spain have already started embracing this approach as they have seen their land being lost to the harsh weather, such as Santiaga Sánchez, a daughter and granddaughter of ranchers in the southern region of Almería. She has been a champion of regenerative agriculture, working to create terraces for farming, managing and collecting water by carving out swales from the ground and cultivating cover crops under almond trees, which show a great level of resilience against the hot weather. Moreover, she feeds her sheep with the cereal she grows herself and uses the animal’s manure, or as she calls it, ‘brown gold’, again for her crops.
Together with other local farmers, she has founded the Alveal organisation, a collaborative bringing together local farmers, breeders, entrepreneurs and specialised researchers. Their mission? To promote local initiatives that defend the territory’s culture, as well as promote the local biodiversity and environment. They organise specialised workshops and online material that teach the essentials of regenerative agriculture, work to expand regional ecological corridors of protected land, and help sustainable businesses by creating a network of high-impact entrepreneurs.
Alfonso Chico de Guzman is one of the many farmers who benefited from Alveal’s workshops and teachings on the topic of regenerative farming. He now manages his own finca, a rural property that presents a farmhouse and living quarters, in La Junquera, not far from the city of Girona. He started on his own, practising the techniques of regenerative agriculture and managing to turn a profit from selling his produce. Now, he gets a lot of help from volunteers who want to contribute to the project, and also from students who want to write their thesis, and now even offers summer courses for young people interested in the field through his Regeneration Academy project.
I would like to end this week’s article by quickly going back to Alveal's mission statement, which also calls to “mobilise local society to promote a resilient territory in which nature and economy can go hand in hand”. I find this part of their proclamation particularly inspiring because it frames the issue of desertification not only as an environmental concern but also that is deeply linked to social factors within a community.
Even more interesting, is that such an angle is very rarely adopted when we talk about any environmental issue, although human livelihood and environmental degradation are deeply tied together. Part of finding a solution to climate change might therefore just involve changing the framing around it, placing greater emphasis on the negative consequences that will fall onto our cultures and livelihoods as a result of ecosystem degradation.
References
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