Task 1

In the climate change film, ‘The Age of Stupid’, the issue was raised that global warming is causing the earths deserts to advance at a rate of 3 miles per year; which is a scary thought. The name for this occurrence is desertification. The definition means that healthy productive land becomes wasteland due to overuse and/or mismanagement. In the case of climate change due to global warming, desertification is occurring as the earth is warming from the depleting o-zone allowing more of the suns energy to enter the atmosphere drying out plant life on the edge of existing deserts. This in turn leaves just soil, which is venerable to wind and water erosion leaving small coarse granules; sand.

This image shows the areas on the African continent where the current desert is at risk of advancing to. The areas are massive!

I see the advance as a very negative effect to agriculture, and it is making more and more space on this very over populated planet practically unusable.

In the 1970’s there was a very successful attempt on stopping the advancement of the Sahara Desert, which was estimated to start advancing southwards down the African continent at a rate of 5-10km per year. The attempts to cease the advancement included planting trees and shrubs, which created a ‘green belt’ along the southern fringe. People also constructed stone lines to capture the moisture that was naturally available. Since the 1970’s, satellite photographs have shown that the Sahara Desert has not made any significant advancements south, and in fact, it appears that the green belt has advanced back onto the Sahara, which is very successful.

Today it is the Sahel desert that is most at risk of a rapid desertification advance and so until, or even if we figure out a way to drastically bring down green house gas emissions, perhaps a similar approach as that used on the Sahara could be used.

I don’t think that desertification would have a huge impact on designers, unless it makes a certain material un-farmable due to loss of agriculture.