Abstract

SARDINHA, Raul Manuel Albuquerque. Dryland Management and Combating Desertification Through Development. Silva Lus. [online]. 2008, vol.16, n.1, pp.21-44. ISSN 0870-6352.

Although desertification process is not new or site specific, the environmental awareness in a world board scale has enlarged and generated a wider public interest, extensive to the scientific circles and governments. Desertification takes place in all continents except Antarctic and affects the livelihoods of millions of people, including a large proportion of the poor in drylands which occupies about 41% of the Earth's land and are home to more than 2 billion people. The persistence of unresolved stabilization of these fragile lands and the substantial reduction in the provision of ecosystem services as a result of intensive use of resources, incapacity of wide spread adequate technologies for providing increased supply of food, forage and fuel, water scarcity, and climate change puts desertification in among the greatest environmental challenges today and a major impediment to meeting human needs and attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. Scenarios for Climate change add up to environmental degradation associated with desertification bringing new threats of intensification of trends in the expansion of these degraded areas. In Portugal, the predictive scenarios on Climate Change points out the risk line of desertification overtaking already the Tagus River. Although Portugal is far better positioned than other desertification prone dry countries in the tropics and whose intervention examples are revised, the author believes that coping with desertification and its economic conditions, just as it is proposed for the tropics, will likely fare better when proactive management approaches and forest research projects are used and when increased integration of land and water management are implemented by effective policies. These integrated approaches may initially have high costs due to technological development and may also have a slow expression in environment improvement but its long term multiplicative effect may make the difference in conserving or enhance biodiversity and being able to provide acceptable livelihood for people in these risk prone areas.

Keywords : ecological effects; human impacts; dryland management; natural resources; management strategies.

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