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The Earth Is Shrinking Advancing Deserts And Rising Seas Squeezing Civilization |
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WASHINGTON, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, Nov. 16 -/E-Wire/--
"Our early twenty-first century civilization is being squeezed between advancing deserts and rising seas," writes Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute.
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Measured by the land area that can support human habitation, the earth is shrinking. Mounting population densities, once generated solely by the addition of over 70 million people per year, are now also fueled by the relentless advance of deserts and the rise in sea level.
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The newly established trends of expanding deserts and rising seas are both of human origin. The former is primarily the result of overstocking grasslands and overplowing land. Rising seas result from temperature increases set in motion by carbon released from the burning of fossil fuels.
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The heavy losses of territory to advancing deserts in China and Nigeria, the most populous countries in Asia and Africa respectively, illustrate the trends for scores of other countries. China is not only losing productive land to deserts, but it is doing so at an accelerating rate. From 1950 to 1975 China lost an average of 600 square miles of land (1,560 square kilometers) to desert each year. By 2000, nearly 1,400 square miles were going to desert annually.
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Nigeria is losing 1,355 square miles of rangeland and cropland to desertification each year. While Nigeria's human population was growing from 33 million in 1950 to 134 million in 2006, a fourfold expansion, its livestock population grew from 6 million to 66 million, an 11-fold increase. With the food needs of its people forcing the plowing of marginal land and the forage needs of livestock exceeding the carrying capacity of its grasslands, the country is slowly turning to desert. In scores of countries, the growth in human and livestock numbers that drives desertification is continuing unabated. (See data.)
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While deserts are now displacing millions of people, rising seas promise to displace far greater numbers in the future given the concentration of the world's population in low-lying coastal cities and rice-growing river deltas. During the twentieth century, sea level rose by 6 inches (15 centimeters). In its 2001 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected that during this century seas would rise by 4 to 35 inches. Since 2001, record-high temperatures have accelerated ice melting making it likely that the future rise in sea level will be even greater.
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A one-meter rise in sea level would inundate vast areas of low-lying coastal land, including many of the rice-growing river deltas and floodplains of India, Thailand, Viet Nam, Indonesia, and China. Hundreds of cities would be at least partly inundated, including London, Alexandria, and Bangkok. More than a third of Shanghai, a city of 15 million people, would be under water. A one-meter rise combined with a 50-year storm surge would leave large portions of Lower Manhattan and the National Mall in Washington, D.C., flooded with seawater.
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Together, rising seas and desertification will present the world with an unprecedented flow of environmental refugees-and the potential for civil strife.
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During this century we must deal with the effects of the trends - rapid population growth, advancing deserts, and rising seas - that we set in motion during the last century. Growth in the human population of over 70 million per year is accompanied by a simultaneous growth of livestock populations of more than 35 million per year. The rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide that are destabilizing the earth's climate are driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Our choice is a simple one: reverse these trends or risk being overwhelmed by them.
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More information is available online at the Earth Policy Institute site. Contact Info:
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Lester Brown
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Earth Policy Institute
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Tel : (202) 496-9290 x 11
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E-mail: lesterbrown@earthpolicy.org Website : Earth Policy Institute
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