Date published: 2006/06/05
The BBC says:
Climate change, high water demand and even tourism are putting unprecedented pressures on the world's desert ecosystems, according to a report.
The Global Deserts Outlook, produced by the UN's Environment Programme, is described as the first comprehensive look at the Earth's driest regions.
It highlights the problems - and also the potential - in arid areas.
The authors call for more careful use of scarce water resources to safeguard the futures of desert populations.
...
Population growth and inefficient water use are, by 2050, set to move some countries with deserts into water stress, or even worse, water scarcity, the report says. Examples include Chad, Iraq, Niger and Syria.Renewable supplies of water which are fed to deserts by large rivers are also expected to be threatened, in some cases severely, by 2025.
Examples include 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.
...
However, the report concludes that although some trends are worrying, other changes likely to occur in the next 50 years could be positive.There are new economic opportunities, it says, such as shrimp and fish farms in Arizona in the US and in the Negev Desert in Israel, offering environmentally friendly livelihoods for local people.
Desert plants and animals are being seen as positive sources of new drugs and crops.
Nipa, a salt grass harvested in the Sonoran desert of north western Mexico at the delta of the Colorado River by the Cocopahs people, thrives on pure seawater, producing large grain yields similar to wheat.
"It is a strong candidate for a major global food crop and could become this desert's greatest gift to the world," the report says.
Even the problems of global warming could be tackled by better use of deserts: some experts say that an area of the Sahara 800km by 800km (500 miles by 500 miles) could capture enough solar energy to meet the entire world's electricity needs.
Well this siren song is all very familiar (name a single major ecosystem which is not suffering "unprecedented pressures"). But it's still worth having experts quantify these things. On the other hand, some of the so-called positive changes are a bit dubious. Fish farms cause plenty of their own environmental problems. And although the Sahara is more than big enough to produce all the world's electricity via solar energy, this is largely irrelevant because it is ignoring the gigantic problem of transmission (from the generating location to the user).
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