http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,413695,00.html
Sahara
jumps Mediterranean into Europe
Global
warming threatens to create dust belt around the globe
Paul Brown, environment
correspondent in Bonn
Wednesday December 20, 2000
The Guardian
The Sahara has crossed
the Mediterranean, forcing thousands
to migrate as a lethal combination of soil degradation and
climate change turns parts of southern Europe into desert.
A major UN conference
was told yesterday that up to a third
of Europe's soil could eventually be affected.
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.
Portugal, Spain, Italy
and Greece are the four EU countries
already so badly affected that they have joined the United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (CCD)
which is meeting in Bonn this week.
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."
The problem is
not confined to the EU. Bulgaria, Hungary,
Moldova, Romania and Russia have all reported signs of
desertification. Experts say Moldova in particular is
"highly vulnerable" to desertification, with about
60% its farmland degraded.
Beyond the Black Sea,
there are belts of fast-degrading
land stretching as far as Mongolia. China, for example,
has said that land deterioration in its northern provinces
is costing its economy £4bn a year.
In places such as drought-stricken
Sardinia and Sicily,
economic conditions are accelerating the problem. "In many
places tourism is making things far worse," Mr Sciortino
said.
"Water is pumped
from below ground, pulling salt water from
the sea into the aquifers. Imagine how much water it takes
to keep an 18-hole golf course going for the tourists.
The trouble is they use the money to buy petrol to drive
the desalination plants for more water and that makes
global warming worse. In the end it means more deserts.
We have to stop this cycle."
Italy has a programme
of helping the countries of North
Africa to combat desertification, partly in order to stem
the increasing tide of refugees attempting to reach Europe.
Valareo Calzolaio,
the Italian environment minister, said
that at first people migrated from the country to the cities
and then "toward remote western mirages - migrants fall to
the network of criminal traders in human beings."
He is also concerned
about the a rise in the number of
refugees from the east: "If we do not take urgent action
then within 10 years millions will be forced to migrate
from their degraded land and they will be heading for
Europe."
Klaus Töpfer,
the former German environment minister
who is now executive director of the UN Environment
Programme, said: "Although often overlooked, soil is
a natural resource that is no less important to human
wellbeing and the environment than clean water and
clean air, the two things that most people in the
EU have been focusing on.
The sustainable use
of soil is one of Europe's greatest
environmental, social and economic challenges."
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."
In a report published
yesterday the agency said the
first stages of serious soil degradation were being
noted in parts of Europe and 150m hectares are at a
high risk of erosion. Deterioration is at a critical
point in Mediterranean countries.
Meanwhile, the situation
is no better in eastern Europe,
where 41% of agricultural land in Ukraine is at risk of
erosion.
Currently, 172 countries
have ratified the the CCD,
as it is known in UN jargon, and this is the fourth
annual meeting of members. It is a sister organisation
to the Climate Change Convention - which recently had
a disastrous meeting in the Hague - and the Biodiversity
Convention, which attempts to preserve habitats and species.
Hama Arba Diallo, the
executive secretary of the convention,
said most schemes to com bat desertification were small-scale
and concentrated in border areas in Africa to prevent
migration and conflict.
"Most of our schemes
cost between $20,000 and $50,000,
and involve local communities identifying what needs
to be done and doing it. I can take people to schemes
in China where $20,000 has turned 15 hectares of desert
into valuable agricultural land. If we had 100 times as
much money we could do 100 similar schemes to push back
the deserts."
However, Mr Diallo
said it was difficult to attract finance
for such small local schemes.
Action
Plan
At this year's Convention
to Combat Desertification (CCD),
countries in southern Europe produced action plans
to deal with:
- Seasonal droughts,
very high rainfall variability and
sudden high-intensity rainfall
- Poor, highly erodable
soil, prone to surface crusts
- Crisis conditions
in traditional agriculture with
associated land abandonment
- An increase in forest
fires
- Concentration of
economic activity in coastal areas
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Related web site:
Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
http://www.unccd.int/main.php/
