Desert Pressures

Protecting the Deserts:

The Global Deserts Outlook, produced by the UN's Environment Programme, is described as the first comprehensive look at the Earth's driest regions, in this recent report it was found that the world’s deserts need better management. The authors of the study call for more careful use of scarce water resources to safeguard the futures of desert populations.

The report defines desert regions in the following three ways:

• Climatologically, as the arid and hyper-arid areas of the globe
• Biologically, as ecoregions that contain plants and animals adapted to an arid existence
• Physically, as those areas with ample extensions of bare soil and low vegetation cover

These areas of the world all together occupy almost ¼ of the Earth’s land surface, some 13 million square miles which are inhabited by over 500 million people. Most of them live at desert margins where the pressures threatening ecosystems in arid areas are at their greatest.

It is estimated that population growth and inefficient water use by 2050 is set to move some countries with deserts into conditions of water stress or water scarcity. Some of these proposed countries are Chad, Iraq, Niger and Syria.

Renewable supplies of water which are fed to deserts by large rivers are also expected to be threatened by 2025, these including the Gariep River in southern Africa; the Rio Grande and Colorado Rivers in North America; the Tigris and Euphrates in south-western Asia and the Amu Darya and Indus Rivers in central Asia.

One exciting example of a new plant that can help feed the world’s people without using freshwater supplies is Nipa, a salt grass harvested in the Sonoran desert of north western Mexico at the delta of the Colorado River. The Cocopahs people harvest this plant which lives on pure seawater and produces large grain yields similar to wheat. Some reports say that it is a strong candidate for a major global food crop and could become “this desert's greatest gift to the world.”

Desert areas around the world are increasingly becoming popular areas for tourism. In the search for cheaper housing, people are spreading out into desert communities as evidenced by Riverside County being the fastest growing county in California. In these desert areas people try to have the same look of home and yard as any other area. New housing tracts are designed with full green lawns around the homes and the watering systems spray clouds of mist into the burning desert air in the middle of the day. This type of planning and management is inefficient and damaging to the environment especially when population demands keep expanding the margins.

Developers and individuals need to take into account the climat eand the area when desiding how big to build homes, what plants to use in landscaping, and what the overal design and layout of the community should be.

Humans are encroaching further and further into the deserts which many think of as dead environments, but which are rich in biodiversity and have real benefits and functions for humanity. We have to think differently about this arid environment as a place that needs to be protected, as an ecosystem with intrinsic value.