The Sahara Reaches Europe

The Sahara Desert in Europe? Can't be, surely not. Guess again.

Going back as far as the colonial era, British and French scientists sounded alarms that the Sahara was expanding southward into West Africa. It still is.

One of these early scientists coined the name "desertification" to describe the transformation of viable land into desert.

In the 1990's a UN commission surveying the problem warned that up to a quarter of the earth's lands faced the threat of desertification.

In a feature story written by Andrew Goudie, a professor of Geography at Oxford, The Guardian describes the process and consequences of the spreading desert:

"The environmental impacts of desertification include a reduction in crop yields, a loss of plants and a deterioration in the quality of plant foodstuffs available to human and animals.

"A lowering of the water table decreases water availability, sand dunes encroach, and winds can generate damaging dust storms, blowing away previously productive soils.

"In addition, remaining soils can become saline when the heat of the sun evaporates moisture, leaving toxic salts behind.

"Desertification is a form of land degradation. Unfortunately, geographers still have few firm data on the rate at which desertification is occurring, and there is some controversy over the way that desert-like conditions spread.

"Contrary to popular misconception, it does not happen over a broad front, like a wave overwhelming a beach. Rather it is like a rash, tending to appear in local patches around wells, roads, settlements and other intensively used areas. "

For decades the desertification problem was dismissed as something confined to Africa. That's no longer the case. Now even parts of the United States are succumbing:

"In the United States of America, insatiable demands for water in the form of the spread of large irrigation schemes and burgeoning recreation have led to accelerated wind erosion in the High Plains.

"These pressures have also caused the desiccation of lakes such as Owens Lake in California. The 1930's American Dust Bowl is a well-documented developed-world example of land degradation under the pressure of inappropriate land-use and cycles of drought."



"Research by the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre in Bracknell has shown that the world's drylands that will tend to suffer the greatest reductions in water availability with global warming. As temperatures increase, most soil water is lost by evaporation but, in addition, the main rainfall belts will also shift.

"Some areas, like the interior of southern Africa, may see a reduction of over 60% of flow in their streams. If this is the case then the world's deserts will indeed expand further, and desertification will affect more of the world's population."

Now the Sahara has jumped the Meditteranean to spread into Europe. Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece have are all losing valuable land to desertification.

"A fifth of Spanish land is so degraded that it is turning into desert, according to figures released for the first time yesterday, and in Italy tracts of land in the south are now abandoned and technically desert.

"One expert, Maurizio Sciortino, said that there were many causes of the soil degradation, including changing weather patterns and the rise of global farming, which is making it uneconomic to run smallholdings and is driving people from the land.

"'Land that has been carefully cultivated and preserved for 2,000 years, with terracing for soil conservation and careful irrigation to keep up productivity, is being abandoned and lost,' he said. 'The walls of the terracing break down, the soil is washed away and we are left with bare rock. Once that happens there is no way back.'


"'The conditions are particularly bad in southern Italy, Spain and Greece. Even southern France is not immune but so far they do not admit it for political reasons.'"

Other nations are also experiencing desertification including Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Bulgaria and Russia. Beyond the Black Sea, swathes of degraded lands stretch east to Mongolia and include China.

"Domingo Jimenez-Beltran, executive director of the European Environment Agency, said: 'In some parts of Europe, the degradation is so severe that it has reduced the soil's capacity to support human communities and ecosystems and resulted in desertification. Because it can take hundreds or thousands of years to regenerate most soils, the damage occurring today is, for all purposes, irreversible.'"

Once land can no longer support agriculture or grazing, it can no longer support its human population either. Already Africa is experiencing climate change-driven migration at levels of hundreds of thousands.

Europe is bracing for migration pressures from Africa. Within a decade the Europeans predict they'll have to either accept or confront refugees from desertification numbering in the millions.

And what lies ahead for Canada? We can expect some degree of similar land degradation, especially in the dry grassland regions of the Western prairie. Prominent Albertans already know this is coming, they've known it for years.

A few years back former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed wrote a lengthy article published in The Globe and Mail warning against yielding to pressures to see Canadian fresh water for export. It seemed a bit strange to read a politician from the ultimate free-trading, anti-regulation province calling for guarding Canada's borders against water traders.

Toward the end of Peter Lougheed's article it all became clear. He didn't want water-rich provinces selling their resource abroad, he wanted it available to meet Alberta's coming needs. That's right folks, the Blue Eyed Sheiks will be coming in search of water. Let's see - we do as much to create the rain as they did to create the oil under their ground so what would be a fair value for this water? I think they should start saving their pennies for a rainy day, if you know what I mean. Or not.