Water, drought and desertification, three terms that go together and make headlines, news, debates and interviews in the media with a frequency unprecedented in Spain. Desertification, defined by the United Nations as “land degradation in arid, semi-arid and arid-subhumid areas due to various factors including climate variability and human activities”, is one of the greatest environmental challenges alongside climate change. that we have as a society, since its climatic characteristics make almost 74% of the area of Spain prone to desertification.
Desertification is a complex phenomenon that is not easy to understand and disseminate, which is why there are often inaccuracies about the phenomenon and its causes. To clear them up, in this forum we briefly discuss some of the misconceptions surrounding desertification and its causes. We also take the opportunity to present some of the main actions that we should take to minimize the negative impact and incidentally also adapt to the new climate scenarios forecast for Spain.
Desertification is not desertification progression, nor does the map of aridity equate to that of desertification. The term desertification derives from the fact that the environmental conditions after the land degradation process resemble those of a desert; However, the low productivity of natural deserts is solely due to the low rainfall and high evapotranspiration in these ecosystems. Desertification is a phenomenon caused by two fundamental factors: climate change and human action. The determinants of desertification are climate change and drought. These are undoubtedly factors that favor this, as they make our arid, semi-arid, and dry-subhumid ecosystems more vulnerable to degradation by reducing the amount of water available, drying out vegetation, and reducing their productivity and ability to recover from disturbances such as overgrazing and wildfires . However, we are the main contributors to desertification in Spain because we abuse important natural resources: soil and water. Due to the poor water balance of dry areas, the regeneration processes of their natural resources are very slow. It may take nature centuries to produce an inch of soil or fill up an aquifer with water, but poorly managed management combined with torrential rains can liquidate that soil in a matter of hours.
The vegetation, its roots and leaf litter hold the soil tight, increasing its fertility and ability to infiltrate and store water. As the vegetation cover disappears, the soil is exposed to the erosive action of water and wind. According to official statistics from the National Soil Erosion Inventory, more than 500 million tons of fertile soil are lost to erosion in our country every year. The data shows that more than a third of Spain’s surface is subject to erosion classified as severe or very severe. In nine autonomous communities, the average annual soil loss is above the tolerable level, namely 12 tons per hectare per year. With soil loss, we not only lose the basis of our food security—more than 98% of the calories we consume come directly or indirectly from the soil—but also a basic water store.
In Spain, as in other parts of the world such as Iran, California, Northwest China, Peru, Saudi Arabia and North Africa, irrigation has become a powerful factor in desertification. Although irrigation contributes to the development of drylands, when it grows excessively, it leads to overexploitation and/or contamination of our surface and groundwater with fertilizers, pesticides and brines. In this way we are building a model of ephemeral growth and prosperity that ultimately results in the main resource that sustains it, water, being degraded, leaving a territory without its main asset to face an increasingly arid world. We must keep in mind that the water that nourishes them is a key aspect for our ecosystems to be able to host life, but also for our well-being and development. And that water in many ecosystems is strongly determined by the contributions of aquifers, which we overexploit, pollute and deplete through agriculture and in some places through intensive livestock farming. The decline of our dryland wetlands, led by Mar Menor, Doñana or Tablas de Daimiel, is a good example, but not the only one, of the serious consequences of an overgrowth of intensive agriculture in our territory. Despite these clear warning signs that have existed for decades, our land has continued to irrigate thousands of acres over the years – between 2011 and 2021 we went from 3.47 to 3.88 million acres of irrigated land – and that’s not all tens of thousands of acres illegally irrigated land was added. Paradoxically, much of this irrigated growth occurs in traditional rain crop species such as olive trees, grapevines, and almond trees.
Not only the excessive use of natural resources can lead to desertification problems. The abandonment of the rural environment, accustomed to our presence and management for millennia, contributes to the creation of highly flammable landscapes. This task, together with the legacy of policies that for decades encouraged forest monoculture and climate change, explains the massive wildfires we are suffering today, ruining economies, soils and forests. In addition to agricultural use, or lack thereof, there has been a tremendous transformation of the territory over the last half century. A process that has no qualms about replacing natural habitats to create infrastructure, equipment, housing and intensive irrigation, leaving the few natural spaces as islands of increasing anthropic pressure.
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What can we do to stop the desertification of our territory? The first thing to do is put an end to illegal irrigation and limit legal ones, the growth of which is simply unsustainable. Since irrigation is a fundamental use in drylands, there is a need to adapt their area to the available water resources, which are becoming increasingly scarce due to climate change. There is a very clear example of what is known as the Jevons paradox in irrigation: the more efficiently we use a resource, the more we use it.
It is clear that water consumption from irrigation – measured by the amount of available water reserves, which in the case of surface water has declined by almost 20 percentage points over the last decade – continues to increase, despite the millions of euros that are invested every year to to improve their efficiency. In the construction, transformation and resilience plan alone, 332 million public euros are to be invested in this. If these investments were really effective, we would see an increase in water reserves, or at least not a decrease in them, as efficiency increases, which is not the case because there is more and more irrigated land. In addition, irrigated agriculture, like animal husbandry, is monopolized by investors who have absolutely nothing to do with this activity and whose primary goal is short-term profit maximization. This has a number of not insignificant effects. Adding to the degradation of common commodities like groundwater are precarious working conditions, lower production costs, the buzzword of mass production, acute psychological stress for farmers and ranchers, suffering tensions between suppliers and wholesalers, and a maldistribution of wealth. Perhaps surprisingly, Spanish municipalities have the lowest income per capita where irrigated agriculture is the main economic activity.
We need to gradually adapt irrigated and rainfed agriculture because, with drier and more unpredictable climates, it is becoming increasingly difficult to do it the way we have done so far. The aim is to switch part of the irrigation to plants that are better adapted to drier climatic conditions, e.g. B. Aromatic plants, carob, aloe vera and others with cosmetic and medicinal purposes that only need supportive irrigation occasionally or depending on rainfall. Irrigation at all and This could allow some productivity in drier climatic conditions than today. Likewise, it is crucial to support the agronomic research carried out in our country, which should focus its efforts on obtaining varieties of basic crops, such as cereals, better adapted to the climatic conditions that we will have in the future.
Other measures that need to be implemented include reducing food waste – according to official figures from the Ministry of Agriculture, almost 64 million kilos of edible fruit and vegetables went unmarketed in Spain between December 2021 and December 2022 – and decarbonization We are particularly attentive to changes in our eating habits, e.g. B. by reducing our consumption of red meat and foods with low nutritional quality and high environmental impact, such as baked goods and snacks, and increasing our consumption of fruits, vegetables, etc. legumes.
We must restore damaged ecosystems by choosing vegetation adapted to current and future environmental conditions and protect our soils, for example by crushing or composting crop residues and cuttings that are now burned in many places, so that they can later be incorporated into the soil. Encouraging extensive livestock farming that can lead to the revitalization of inland areas, managing our forest masses to adapt them to a drier climate, minimizing the amounts of fuel they store, and reducing imports of soybeans that are wreaking havoc on distant ecosystems, are also actions that should be done sensibly.
Spain is the country in Europe with the most significant impacts of climate change. And one of the areas most at risk of desertification in the world, the result of development that exploits natural resources to the point of exhaustion to maximize short-term economic benefits at the expense of natural ecosystems and their own future sustainability. The necessary solutions to combat desertification require social will, dialogue between all stakeholders and determined and coordinated political action between administrations, which unfortunately is not the case today. As Gandalf rightly says, ‘All we must decide is what to do with the time we have been given’ and we must decide whether to use it to further desolate our territory and a land of far beyond leaving fewer opportunities to house an environment and create a healthy economy or to work resolutely to reverse the decay.
Fernando T Meisterdistinguished researcher at the University of Alicante and National Research Prize “Alejandro Malaspina” 2022; Jaime Martinez Valderrama, postdoctoral fellow at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones-CSIC; And Jorge OlcinaProfessor of Geography at the University of Alicante and representative of the Generalitat Valenciana for the Vega Renhace plan.
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