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News Home |
Story

Desertification, dust 'global threats'

From correspondents in Oslo, Norway
June 17, 2005

From: Reuters

Advertisement:

DESERTIFICATION threatens to drive millions of people
from their homes in coming decades while vast dust storms can damage the health
of people continents away, an international report said
today.
"Desertification has emerged as a global problem affecting everyone,"
said Zafar Adeel, assistant director of the UN University's water academy and a
lead author of a report drawing on the work of 1360 scientists in 95 nations.

Two billion people live in drylands vulnerable to desertification, ranging
from northern Africa to swathes of central Asia, he said.

And storms can lift dust from the Sahara Desert, for instance, and cause
respiratory problems for people as far away as North America.

Over-grazing and over-planting of crops, swelling human populations and
misuse of irrigation were contributing to desertification, the report said. It
estimated that 10-20 per cent of drylands were already degraded.

Global warming, widely blamed on human emissions of heat-trapping gases from
cars, factories and power plants, was likely to exacerbate the problems in
coming decades by triggering more floods, droughts and heatwaves.

"Growing desertification worldwide threatens to swell by millions the number
of poor forced to seek new homes and livelihoods," according to the report, part
of a Millennium Ecosystem Assessment led by UN agencies and other groups.

"Desertification is potentially the most threatening ecosystem change
impacting livelihoods of the poor," it said.

The report said 41 per cent of the world's land area was dryland, including
most of Australia, the western part of North America and much of the Andean
region of South America.

Desertification meant increasing health problems linked to dust, reduced farm
production and poverty.

Infant mortality in drylands in developing nations averaged 54 children per
1000 live births in 2000, double the rate in other poor regions and 10 times the
rate in industrial nations.

"An increase in desertification-related dust storms is widely considered to
be a cause of ill-health - fever, coughing, sore eyes - during the dry season,"
it said.

And dust from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia could affect people as far away as
Japan or Hawaii. Some scientists estimate that a billion tonnes of dust can be
lifted from the Sahara region into the atmosphere every year.

Dust particles can also carry bacteria and fungi. Dust-borne microrganisms
from Africa were believed to have damaged coral reefs in the Caribbean, said
Uriel Safriel, another of the report's lead authors.

"Bedouins in Israel are known to be infected by spores of fungi and bacteria
transported by dust," he said.

Some dust carries toxins like pesticides from around the Aral Sea.

And dust storms from Africa can damage plants' ability to grow as far away as
Florida by muting the sunlight.

African dust, however, can also carry nutrients and is credited with helping
forests to survive in the Amazon.

The report said that better management of crops, more careful irrigation and
strategies to provide non-farming jobs for people living in drylands could help
mute problems. But it was easier to prevent desertification than to reverse it.

The United States, for instance, failed fully to solve the 1930s Dust Bowl -
caused by a combination of intensive farming and drought in states including
Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma. The problems resurfaced in the
1950s.

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