Drought and desertification threatens to degrade land in Europe and around the world. We take a look at some new studies into how drought spreads and deserts develop.
The scale of the issue is sometimes under-appreciated, but drylands cover over 41% of the Earth’s terrestrial land surface. They are now home to over 38% of the world’s population. The UN sponsors the World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought on 17 June 2022 to highlight the issue.
Droughts lead to the loss of arable land through desertification, the death of vegetation and a scarcity of drinking water.
Europe is not immune to the intensifying aridity, quite apart from heatwaves. Water stress and aridity affect 168 000 square kilometres in Italy and 365 000 square kilometres in Spain, according to data compiled by the Joint Research Centre (JRC). (See box below).
Scientists in the DRY-2-DRY project, using climate models, satellite data and meteorological measurements, are researching the capacity of drought and heatwaves to intensify and propagate by themselves.
‘This is a process that hasn’t been studied before,’ said Prof Diego Miralles, Professor of Hydrology and Climate at Ghent University, Belgium.
‘By understanding it better, we can get better forecasts of how droughts may evolve and set early warnings for adaptation early enough,’ he said.
The availability of water is determined by two factors – ‘how much it rains and how much the atmosphere demands from the land during the process of evaporation,’ said Mirralles.
‘This balance of moisture has been changing due to global warming. While precipitation is changing differently in different regions, evaporation is mostly increasing due to the increase in temperature. Therefore, there is a tendency for most regions in the world to become increasingly arid,’ said Miralles.
Whatever the cause of drought, it affects general ecosystem dynamics, including availability of drinking water for the population. It also has serious implications for biodiversity, as plants must be able to photosynthesise with less water in the soil as well as cope with an atmosphere that evaporates more water thanks to higher temperatures.
Drought often leads to desertification, where the land is so arid it becomes infertile and loses biological productivity. This has catastrophic consequences on societies and ecosystems.
In the case of a drought, the evaporation cycle becomes a vicious circle. Since evaporation is lower, there’s less likelihood of condensing water in the atmosphere and triggering rainfall. With a dry atmosphere, there is less water to moisturise the soil. Furthermore, the soil tends to dry out in spring because it’s already warmer than before.
Then, plants start to grow and consume the water earlier in the year. The summer commences with drier soil and there is no way to buffer the temperature by evaporating water.
‘This is known to happen locally,’ said Miralles, ‘But we are looking at how the wind moving that mass of dry air to another location can trigger a new drought. It becomes a bit like a wildfire.’
The impact of rising global temperatures means, not only are there heat waves and more droughts but they tend to occur at the same time.
There are two ways to improve the situation – to adapt and to mitigate. ‘Land cover change (with vegetation for example) as an adaptation measure can help us resist heat waves, but we must make sure that this is not our plan A,’ said Miralles. ‘Plan A should be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.’
To learn more about Prof. Miralles’ analysis of drought ,follow the link to the Dry2Dry homepage.
Prof. Fernando Maestre, professor of Ecology at the University of Alicante, began his research in Spain in 2005. The project BIODESERT carried out the first global field survey to evaluate how changes in climate and land use, such as grazing pressure, affect drylands ecosystems.
In order to survey such a vast phenomenon, collaborative work is key. The BIODESERT project is now global and includes scientists and ecosystems from 21 countries on all continents, with the exception of Antarctica.
‘I asked all the research teams to do everything exactly as we had already done it in Spain, because using different methods would have meant we wouldn’t have been able to compare the results from the various areas surveyed across the world,’ said Maestre. ‘Our approach in Spain had proved its worth, now we had to test if it could function in a different environment. And it did!’
With the shifting sands of time, the problem of land degradation in arid areas and drylands has spread since the first UN Plan of Action to Combat Desertification was adopted in 1977. There are serious threats to food security, biodiversity and the world economy as more and more territory succumbs to desertification.
The researchers observed that plant and microbial diversity plays a key role in maintaining the capacity of drylands to provide essential ecosystem services linked to soil fertility and the production of plant biomass. These ecosystem services are fundamental for supporting the livelihood of more than one billion people globally.
They also reported that increases in aridity promote abrupt changes on the structure and functioning of drylands. This culminates with a shift to low-cover (sparse vegetation) ecosystems that are nutrient- and species-poor at high aridity values.
The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 call for sustainable land management and increased co-operation “on desertification, dust storms, land degradation and drought” to promote resilience and avoid disaster.
‘Until a few years ago, nobody could imagine the important role of biodiversity in global drylands, nor the presence of multiple ecosystem thresholds in response to increases in aridity.’ These discoveries improve the understanding of how drylands are changing in response to climate change, now and in the future.
Eventually, these insights may be used to help design effective action to stem desertification across drylands worldwide. The JRC’s new edition of the World Atlas of Desertification specifically states that “land degradation is considered to be a global problem of human dominance”.
BIODESERT is now testing the suitability of multiple early warning indicators. Results suggest that the characteristics of dryland vegetation may be used to flag ecosystem degradation across global drylands. They also plan to expand the research programme to start exploring long-term changes in the structure and functioning of drylands, by again surveying the original field sites they surveyed over 15 years ago.
To learn more, about World Day to Combat Drought and Desertification on 17 June 2022, follow the link to the UN World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought homepage.
The EU Mission ‘A Soil Deal for Europe’ is leading the transition towards healthy soils by 2030 by establishing 100 living labs and lighthouses. Fighting desertification and restoring soils is one of its main aims. Follow the link to learn more about A Soil Deal for Europe.
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
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Nine of the 16 oil blocks to be auctioned in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) next month overlap Protected Areas, according to a review of official government maps by Greenpeace Africa. Minister Didier Budimbu, who had previously insisted that “none” of the blocks overlaps Protected Areas, confirmed Greenpeace’s findings in a statement yesterday.
Plans to auction rainforest for oil were reactivated in April, five months after the signature of a $500 million forest deal signed with the Central African Forest Initiative (CAFI) at COP26.
Greenpeace Africa and others have expressed alarm that three of the blocks overlap with the Cuvette Centrale peatlands, a biodiversity hotspot containing about 30 gigatons of carbon, equivalent to three years of global emissions. Oil drilling could release the immense stocks of carbon they store, warned Professor Simon Lewis of University College London.
That Protected Areas are also at risk became apparent last month when the Hydrocarbons Ministry itself published a video featuring a map of six of the 16 blocks : five of them are clearly shown to overlap Protected Areas. The voice-over praises the “meticulousness” with which blocks had been “selected,” mindful of environmental “sensibilities,” and claiming input from unnamed environmentalists. Another official online source, the Environment Ministry Forest Atlas of the Democratic Republic of Congo, shows nine of the blocks overlapping Protected Areas, including a national park, nature reserves, and a mangroves marine park.
The Ministry’s statement to Greenpeace Africa asserts: “It’s been decided that Protected Areas containing mineral natural resources of high economic value will be degazetted.” While it describes the overlaps as “very negligible,” a simple review of the map shows significant overlap in at least three cases, including that of Upemba National Park, part of which occupies about a third of the Upemba block.
Irene Wabiwa Betoko, International Project Leader for the Congo Basin forest at Greenpeace Africa: “The auction of new oil blocks anywhere during a climate crisis that disproportionately affects African people is mad. Greenwashing the auction of blocks overlapping peatlands and Protected Areas is the height of cynicism. Doing so with such amateurism is particularly disturbing.”
In its statement to Greenpeace Africa, the Ministry emphasizes that no areas inside UNESCO World Heritage sites are up for auction and that overlaps are restricted to other Protected Areas. Congolese law, however, makes no distinction, in terms of oil exploration, among Protected Areas.
Block 18, one of the few that doesn’t encroach on a Protected Area, is only about twenty kilometers from Salonga National Park, a UNESCO site. In July 2021, the DRC government succeeded in removing Salonga from the List of World Heritage in Danger after it promised to update UNESCO, no later than 1 February 2022, on “the progress made towards the definitive cancellation of the oil concessions” there. Over two months after the deadline, the government reported that the park’s steering committee decided on 14 December 2021 to “initiate actions for the[ir] definitive cancellation.” Instead of finally acting, the government continues planning to act.
“The mouth that says all the right things about the climate and biodiversity crises works separately from the hand that signs the contracts that make them worse. This disconnect also characterizes DRC’s donors: their COP26 speeches in praise of the Congo rainforest have resulted in an agreement that is an open invitation to oil companies,” added Irene Wabiwa.
The agreement signed at COP26 does nothing to protect peatlands of the Cuvette Centrale from the oil and gas industry, and is hardly more demanding with regard to the integrity of Protected Areas. Instead of banning extractive industries in them, the 2 November letter of intent seeks only damage control. It calls for a study “to determine to what extent the titles […] of hydrocarbons overlap with and/or have an impact on protected areas, […] with a view to adopting appropriate prevention or mitigation measures […]”.
Greenpeace Africa calls on the DRC government to cancel the auction of new oil blocks: “Instead of auto-pilot steering Congo into a climate catastrophe, the government and the international community must invest in ending energy poverty by accelerating investments in clean and accessible renewable energies,” concluded Irene Wabiwa.
The most significant changes can be sudden, not gradual, if the circumstances are right. Horizon Magazine listened in on a recent discussion between leading climate change scientists on the role of ‘tipping points’ in the climate transition.
A tipping point is defined as a small intervention that leads to major long-term consequences which are hard to reverse.
Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will be impossible, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in April. That means global emissions must peak before 2025, and be reduced 43% by 2030, the UN body said.
This question was examined during a virtual training conference on 7 June 2022 entitled “Tipping points – Threat and Opportunity” where European policy officers, researchers and academics heard about the power of negative and positive tipping points in the climate change driven transformation. The keynote speakers were Profs Tim Lenton and Johan Rockström.
From individuals flying less to the energy sector abandoning fossil fuels, major changes are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fast enough to prevent climate disaster.
There is evidence of instability in many of the Earth’s major systems, including the Amazon rainforest, the summer ice cover in the Arctic, and the Western Arctic ice shelf, said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, in his keynote address. The sustainability expert and Professor in Earth System Science at the University of Potsdam in Germany went on to say, ‘Already at 1.5 °C we’re at risk of crossing irreversible thresholds on unique and threatened systems.’
Rockström’s work on sustainable Earth systems is highly influential and is summed up in a video presentation for TED Talks entitled 10 years to transform the future of humanity — or destabilize the planet. He and his colleagues have also studied the effects of feedback in the Earth’s climate that can reinforce the hothouse effects of human activity.
‘If we’re going to have any hope of limiting global warming near 1.5 °C, we’ve got to accelerate the decarbonisation of the global economy by at least a factor of five,’ said keynote speaker Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute and professor of Climate Change and Earth System Science at the University of Exeter.
One important way to shift deeply ingrained behaviours is to find social and political ‘tipping points’, he said. One example of a social tipping point began with Greta Thunberg’s decision in 2018 to skip school and hold her lone climate protest outside the Swedish Parliament.
Thunberg’s decision made it ‘incrementally easier’ for other young people to join her, until within months huge numbers around the world were demanding stronger climate action, said Prof Lenton.
In response to this social movement, the European Parliament voted to declare a climate emergency in November 2019, said Prof Lenton, lead author of a paper entitled Operationalising positive tipping points towards global sustainability.
‘As Greta would remind us, it’s not enough to just have political rhetoric on the topic. We need actual action … in the form of a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,’ said Prof Lenton.
Another tipping point in the UK resulted in the country abandoning coal power, which produced 40% of the country’s electricity as recently as a decade ago. That change was triggered by a combination of three things: investment in wind power, introducing carbon pricing in the power generation sector and the EU carbon trading price (the EU ETS), said Prof Lenton. Once it became unprofitable to invest in coal, utility companies started demolishing coal-fired power stations.
‘We will never go back and start rebuilding coal power stations in the UK, and good riddance to them,’ said Prof Lenton.
Although some governments know how to create tipping points to bring about the changes needed to halve emissions by 2030, the majority do not, Prof Lenton told Horizon Magazine.
However, he said governments representing more than 70% of global GDP are signed up to the ‘Breakthrough Agenda’, which informs them about the opportunities and how they can play their part. The agenda was launched at last year’s COP26 climate talks in Glasgow.
According to a poll carried out last year in G20 countries on the subject of attitudes to planetary transformation and stewardship, people’s awareness of the climate and biodiversity crisis is high, but they are less aware of the scale of behaviour change that is required.
The vast majority – 83% – said they wanted to do more to protect and restore nature. However, when asked what actions they would take, they prioritised increasing recycling and avoiding excess packaging.
‘Higher impact changes like diet change and flying less are consistently bottom of their list,’ said Sophie Thompson, who was part of the Ipsos MORI team that carried out the survey.
‘We believe this is because they’re unaware and maybe misinformed of which are the most effective actions to take,’ Thompson said.
‘Positive social tipping points are very much the holy grail of public policy on the (European) Green Deal, alongside technology,’ said Jean-Eric Paquet, Director General of Research and Innovation in the European Commission. He said tipping points will play a key role for Europe.
‘Scientists and policymakers have a major responsibility to continue to work on these positive social tipping points,’ said Paquet, ‘To ensure that we can progressively continue to bring society along.’
More positive tipping points are needed to curb emissions. There is a conundrum about why people do not act even when they know the science, said David Mair, Head of Unit, Knowledge for Policy: Concepts and Methods, at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
‘Don’t assume that you just have to get people to believe in climate change, and … then the behavioural change, or the political change, or the attitude change is going to follow automatically,’ said Mair.
‘It’s our values and our identities that drive how we decide what we do,’ he said.
‘Ultimately, we need political processes which speaks to all our values and identities … this is a political problem so we need politics to solve it,’ he said.
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
With around 70% of the planet’s surface covered by ocean, the EU Mission to restore our ocean and waters focuses on positive actions to restore marine ecosystems, eliminate pollution, and make our blue economy carbon neutral and circular. To mark World Ocean Day on 8 June, Horizon Magazine takes a dive into two collaborative projects working to deliver on the first of these ambitious goals.
Beneath the ocean’s silky waters, ecosystems as we know them are disappearing. From overfishing and deep-sea mining to climate change, human activity is degrading the vital ecosystems that allow our oceans to function. On World Ocean Day, the United Nations is calling for collaborative action to protect the world’s oceans and ultimately our planet.
Around the world, countries, communities and researchers are already working to undo the damage human activity has wreaked upon our seas and oceans. But, first, they need to come to grips with the extent of the problem.
This is what Mission Atlantic sets out to do. The project is mapping, modelling and assessing Atlantic Ocean ecosystems and identifying the major threats to them, together with 34 partners in multiple countries and around 150 principal investigators.
Patrizio Mariani is the project coordinator at Mission Atlantic and an ocean technology specialist at the Technical University of Denmark. ‘The diversity we have in the Atlantic is just humongous,’ he said, ‘And the unknowns that we have are also very, very big.’
The Atlantic Ocean covers about a fifth of the Earth’s surface, brushing against four continents with millions of people who directly rely on it for their livelihood.
‘There has been a lot of talk about holistic or systematic approaches to marine ecosystems, and having all the pieces that impact an ecosystem considered together,’ said Mariani. But there are few examples of such approaches being implemented. Mission Atlantic aims to ‘Put things together and understand the feedbacks and the complexity of the system.’
Scientists, managers and stakeholders come from Brazil, South Africa, North America and the European Union. The project brings them together to map out the pressures of human activity and their consequences on the Atlantic ecosystem.
The research applies a framework called Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEA) to seven different sites in the Atlantic. First adopted by the US’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), IEAs are an approach to ecosystem based management of marine environments. Scientists are conducting IEAs in the Atlantic to identify different human behaviours and link these activities to their consequences for ecosystems. IEAs are designed to answer certain questions, according to Mariani, such as “What are the pressures we generate in a region and what are the ecosystem components that are affected?”
For some of the sites, such as the Norwegian Sea in the north or the Benguela Current just off the coast of South Africa, it is relatively easy to connect human activities to a particular nation or group of countries. But two of the project’s case studies are in the open ocean, which creates interesting opportunities for advancing science but also challenges, said Mariani. ‘(In the open ocean), we’re dealing mostly with international waters. There is not always a good mapping of human activities and there are not always clear regulations. But they are very important areas because typically they are hotspots of biodiversity and they are really exposed to the ocean conditions,’ he said.
Scientists need to understand how the ocean conditions change with time. To create a comprehensive picture, the project uses numerical models to generate this data, running from 1980 through to 2030. But there are many gaps, so the team is collecting ocean data to validate their models. ‘We are now introducing data, analysing the time series, and mapping many of the ecosystem components at the scale of the entire Atlantic Ocean,’ he said. Using the latest technology, scientists are surveying biodiversity hotspots, sending autonomous wave gliders (a type of ocean robot) out into the deep reaches of the Atlantic to gather data, and even listening to the whispers of the ocean with acoustic surveys at different frequencies. While the scientists are eager to investigate the mysteries of the Atlantic, the ultimate goal of Mission Atlantic is to support countries, industries and people to treat the ocean in a sustainable way. At project’s end in 2025, the team plans to offer policymakers a summary of their findings as well as tools to help them make decisions. These tools will help countries decide “If I (make) this area a protected area, what will happen to the (fish), or if I start exploiting this region for energy, what will happen to dependent communities”, said Mariani. Preliminary findings of Mission Atlantic are already supporting authorities in Brazil in deciding where to locate their marine reserves.
Once researchers have assessed the environmental damage underwater, the next step is to restore degraded ecosystems and halt their decline.
Under the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, for example, a brown forest canopy sustains a world of biodiversity. Made of brown seaweed called Cystoseira, these forests provide food and nutrients to plants and animals, absorb carbon and create safe nurseries for juvenile sea species. The danger is real, because human activities have destroyed more than 80% of the Mediterranean’s normally productive macroalgal forests. It is almost impossible for these forests to rejuvenate when their populations become locally extinct.
‘The degree of damage to marine ecosystems is expanding and is now reaching huge dimensions,’ said Professor Roberto Danovaro, an ecologist at Polytechnic University of Marche in Italy.
But Danovaro and a team of researchers are finding ways to restore these vital habitats. The AFRIMED project works to seed new forests and resuscitate these marine ecosystems, having emerged from the €6.7-million MERCES project to restore marine ecosystems, which assessed different degraded European marine ecosystems.
AFRIMED looks to identify areas for algal forest restoration, trial technologies to restore these locations, and ultimately develop a step-by-step guide on how to rebuild these valuable ecosystems.
‘The basic work starts from understanding how much of these habitats have been lost, when and why,’ said Danovaro, who is project coordinator. ‘Second, you need to understand if there has been a species shift. For example, there may be macroalgae there, but they are not the same. A third issue is, how to practically do restoration.’
Restoration is tricky – simply transplanting algae can denude other vulnerable habitats and not all of the algae (there are dozens of species of Cystoseira) may survive living in another location. ‘Finding a good place for restoration is (also) essential,’ he said. ‘If you find a place that is still under pressure, the restoration may fail.’
In some places, researchers have been able to grow new algal recruits on rocks and other surfaces which they can then move to the bare habitat. In other cases, AFRIMED members have grown the algae in the laboratory and transplanted it to its new home.
‘It’s real interdisciplinary work,’ said Dr Silvia Bianchelli, a researcher at Polytechnic University of Marche. ‘We need an expert on the algae, an expert on the ecosystem, an expert on the environmental conditions, and also a technician for the lab.’
It goes beyond working between disciplines, though. Nations, their industries and citizens will have to work together to preserve their shared resources – and the Mediterranean itself.
‘Restoration is not only a scientific or ecological process,’ Bianchelli said. ‘It involves socioeconomic components. So (while) scientific teams work on ecological restoration, they need to also involve a lot of stakeholders. Successful restoration needs first to stop the anthropogenic pressure.’
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
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