What is desertification explain?

The United Nations’ official definition says desertification is land degradation in typically dry areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities. Many things can cause desertification. Drought, overgrazing, fire, and deforestation can thin out vegetation, leaving exposed soil.

How does desertification affect the desert?

Land degradation and desertification can affect human health through complex pathways. As land is degraded and deserts expand in some places, food production is reduced, water sources dry up and populations are pressured to move to more hospitable areas. the spread of infectious diseases as populations migrate.

What is the difference between drought and desertification?

Drought is natural phenomenon when one area receives no water and becomes barren with no vegetation. Desertification is a process of turning out a productive fertile land to a non-productive land and in severe cases the drylands are termed as desertification.

What are 3 causes of desertification?

Human activities that contribute to desertification include the expansion and intensive use of agricultural lands, poor irrigation practices, deforestation, and overgrazing. These unsustainable land uses place enormous pressure on the land by altering its soil chemistry and hydrology.

What is desert encroachment?

Desert encroachment as a degradation of land in arid, semi-arid and sub-humid dry areas caused mainly by climatic changes and human activities; In Nigeria, the dry land parts of the country are more prone to desertification.

What causes desert?

Deserts are formed by weathering processes as large variations in temperature between day and night put strains on the rocks, which consequently break in pieces. Rocks are smoothed down, and the wind sorts sand into uniform deposits. The grains end up as level sheets of sand or are piled high in billowing sand dunes.

Why the Sahara became a desert?

The rise in solar radiation amplified the African monsoon, a seasonal wind shift over the region caused by temperature differences between the land and ocean. The increased heat over the Sahara created a low pressure system that ushered moisture from the Atlantic Ocean into the barren desert.

What is the difference between drought and erosion?

Drought is the deficit of rainfall over a long period, such as a season, a year or several years, related to the statistical average of a region. There is a process of natural soil erosion, caused by heavy downpours, winds or drought.

What is the relationship between desertification and drought?

Land degradation or scientifically desertification is due mainly to anthropogenic factors and accelerated by climate change and drought. Drought triggers the desertification, and also the desertification can influence the drought by reducing the water soil content (surface moisture).

What causes a desert?

How is desertification controlled?

Control of Desertification:

1. Afforestation and planting of soil binding grasses can check soil erosion, floods and water logging.
2. Crop rotation and mixed cropping improve the fertility of the soil.
3. Desertification can be checked by artificial bunds or covering the area with proper type of vegetation.

What is land desertification?

Desertification is a type of land degradation in which a relatively dry land region becomes increasingly arid, typically losing its bodies of water as well as vegetation and wildlife. It is caused by a variety of factors, such as climate change and human activities.

What is meant by desertification?

Desertification is the degradation process by which a fertile land changes itself into a desert by losing its flora and fauna, this can be caused by drought, deforestation, climate change, human activities or improper agriculture. Desertification is a process of degradation of the land.

How does the desert change over time?

These changes occur naturally as climate shifts and alters rainfall patterns. Changing vegetation patterns can also cause subtle change in the arbitrary line defining a desert. Within the past few thousand years, however, desertification has become the most common cause of desert encroachment.

How many people are affected by desertification in the world?

About 1.2 billion people are at risk from desertification as deserts expand and degraded drylands cover close to a third of the world’s land surface area, the United Nations estimates. As per the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the rate of desertification is speeding up.

Does desertification cause desert encroachment?

Based on observation of local desert encroachment caused by desertification, there is no denying that, if large-scale desert encroachment were to occur, the face of the world would be radically altered.