Desertification risk fuels spatial polarization in ‘affected’ and ‘unaffected’ landscapes in Italy

Southern Europe is a hotspot for desertification risk because of the intimate impact of soil deterioration, landscape transformations, rising human pressure, and climate change. In this context, large-scale empirical analyses linking landscape fragmentation with desertification risk assume that increasing levels of land vulnerability to degradation are associated with significant changes in landscape structure. Using a traditional approach of landscape ecology, this study evaluates the spatial structure of a simulated landscape based on different levels of vulnerability to land degradation using 15 metrics calculated at three time points (early-1960s, early-1990s, early-2010s) in Italy. While the (average) level of land vulnerability increased over time almost in all Italian regions, vulnerable landscapes demonstrated to be increasingly fragmented, as far as the number of homogeneous patches and mean patch size are concerned. The spatial balance in affected and unaffected areas—typically observed in the 1960s—was progressively replaced with an intrinsically disordered landscape, and this process was more intense in regions exposed to higher (and increasing) levels of land degradation. The spread of larger land patches exposed to intrinsic degradation brings to important consequences since (1) the rising number of hotspots may increase the probability of local-scale degradation processes, and (2) the buffering effect of neighbouring (unaffected) land can be less effective on bigger hotspots, promoting a downward spiral toward desertification.

Scientific Programming Tools for Water Management

This special issue delivers a platform in which researchers expose intersections between algorithm design, software platforms, and hardware architectures to deal with emerging challenges in the scientific field of management of water and water-dependent resources. Since the call for papers was announced in June 2019, this special issue has received 10 manuscripts. After a rigorous review process, 6 papers have been finally accepted for publication. Published papers deal with groundwater quality monitoring, coastal groundwater-dependent irrigation agriculture, desertification risk, water recovery from tailings, future scenarios of water resources, and vulnerability of coastal aquifers.

Desertification and Degradation Risks vs Poverty: A Key Topic in Mediterranean Europe

Land degradation and, subsequently, desertification processes are conditioned by biophysical factors and human impacts. Nowadays, there is an increasing interest by social scientists to assess its implications. Especially, it is relevant to the potential changes and landscape deterioration on population, economic systems and feedbacks of local societies to such adjustments. Assessing social facets should also be related to desertification risks, integrated socio-economic inputs and environmentally sustainable development perspectives. However, investigations about the effects of land degradation conditioned by global socioeconomic-factors from a holistic point of view are scarce. In this review, we pretend to discuss past and recent findings on land degradation risks related to poverty, especially based on Mediterranean Europe. To achieve this goal, we focused on key socioeconomic forces such as developmental policy, production and market structure, social change and population mobility. Our review showed that regional disparities based on complex dynamics of demographic forces (e.g. migration, fertility and ageing) and economic drivers of change (e.g. industrial concentration, urbanization, crop intensification, tourism pressure, coastalization) are keys to understand Mediterranean regions such as Southern Italy, a region exposed to high desertification risk in Europe. We concluded that the overexploitation of territories, soil and water degradation urban expansion, tourism and unplanned industrialization are some sectors and activities which can be highly affected by political and socioeconomic forces leading to unsustainable forms of land management and types of development. Special attention should be paid to social policies, education and training schemes to reduce rural migration and potentiate territorial knowledge to avoid land degradation, considering other social issues such as poverty or centralization. The potential role of win-win policies abating poverty and reducing desertification risk is evident in Mediterranean Europe and achieving land degradation neutrality necessary.

Assessing desertification sensitivity map under climate change and agricultural practices scenarios: the island of Crete case study

The aim of this study is the assessment of desertification risk in a typical Mediterranean island, in the frame of climate change and the application of good agricultural practices (GAPs). Based on the MEDALUS Environmentally Sensitive Area Index (ESAI) approach, the sensitivity in desertification is estimated by employing 15 quantitative parameters divided in four main quality indices: climate, vegetation, soil and management quality. The methodology applied for a baseline scenario (current conditions), two future climate change scenarios (RCP 4.5 and RCP 8.5) and a soil quality improvement scenario. According to the results, more than 13% of the island's area is characterized as critically sensitive to desertification in the current conditions. This percentage seems to be increased in the future under both the RCP 4.5 and the RCP 8.5 climate scenarios, where the critical areas will rise above to 15%. By applying, simultaneously with the climate change scenarios, the soil quality improvement scenario, a slight mitigation of desertification risk in the future could be achieved. The methodology developed in this study may be used to assess desertification process under various climate, soil and land use management scenarios in regions of the Mediterranean Sea.

From Historical Narratives to Circular Economy: De-Complexifying the “Desertification” Debate

Assuming the importance of a “socioeconomic mosaic” influencing soil and land degradation at the landscape scale, spatial contexts should be considered in the analysis of desertification risk as a base for the design of appropriate counteracting strategies. A holistic approach grounded on a multi-scale qualitative and quantitative assessment is required to identify optimal development strategies regulating the socioeconomic dimensions of land degradation. In the last few decades, the operational thinking at the base of a comprehensive, holistic theory of land degradation evolved toward many different conceptual steps. Moving from empirical, qualitative and unstructured frameworks to a more structured, rational and articulated thinking, such theoretical approaches have been usually oriented toward complex and non-linear dynamics benefiting from progressive and refined approximations. Based on these premises, eleven disciplinary approaches were identified and commented extensively on in the present study, and were classified along a gradient of increasing complexity, from more qualitative and de-structured frameworks to more articulated, non-linear thinking aimed at interpreting the intrinsic fragmentation and heterogeneity of environmental and socioeconomic processes underlying land degradation. Identifying, reviewing and classifying such approaches demonstrated that the evolution of global thinking in land degradation was intimately non-linear, developing narrative and deductive approaches together with inferential, experimentally oriented visions. Focusing specifically on advanced economies in the world, our review contributes to systematize multiple—sometimes entropic—interpretations of desertification processes into a more organized framework, giving value to methodological interplays and specific interpretations of the latent processes underlying land degradation.