Global warming threatens desertification in parts of Africa. This has major consequences for the living conditions of the population. Economists calculated how fast their food production is decreasing now that the soil is getting drier.
About 52 million square kilometers of the earth’s surface consists of dry land. That is more than a third of the total of 144.5 million square kilometers of land, the rest is water. Such a dry zone is defined as an area in which the total amount of precipitation is equal to the amount of evaporation and transpiration of plants. The right balance between precipitation from the atmosphere and evaporation of water is essential for the fertility of the soil. Due to climate change, that balance is swinging in the wrong direction in more and more areas, which has major consequences for the availability of food.
Africa pays the price
As of 2015, some 500 million people live in areas that experienced desertification between 1980 and 2000, according to a report by the UN climate panel IPCC. This will only get worse in the coming decades. An additional 250 million people are estimated to be affected by desertification in their region by 2050. And Africa pays the highest price. While these predictions are grim, little research has been done on the economic impact of desertification, where land becomes less fertile due to a lack of precipitation.
Economists have now made an attempt to calculate the extent to which the income of the inhabitants of these types of dry areas is declining. Desertification worsens people’s living conditions in all sorts of ways: there are water and food shortages, which directly affect not only people, but also livestock and crops, all of which need water. If people cannot move to countries or areas where there is less drought, this means a significant decline in their quality of life.
Less income now
That is already happening, researchers calculated, who created a database with figures from all over the world. “It is estimated that the income of people in Africa as a whole has decreased by an average of 12 percent between 1990 and 2015 due to desertification. This will rise to 16 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) in 2079. Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb in the north of the continent are relatively much more affected,” the researchers say. Remarkably, Asia suffers much less from desertification, with the exception of the interior of Russia, China and Mongolia.
In Africa, however, the situation is very serious. The reduced fertility of the soil also has consequences for the health of children at birth. Because they simply do not get enough to eat, their body weight is too low and their life expectancy is reduced. This is a direct result of poorer harvests, which not only occur in years with extreme weather, such as heavy rain or persistent drought, but also slowly get worse in the years to come.
Less rice, wheat and soybeans
The researchers come up with even more concrete figures. “Our results show that between 1995 and 2005, soil dehydration led to a global loss of approximately 1.7 million tons of grain, 81,000 tons of rice, 786,000 tons of soybeans and 430,000 tons of wheat. And almost all of this in Africa and to a lesser extent in Asia.”
And it will only get worse in the future, according to the models in which the economists have looked at the evapotranspiration potential, or the ability of soil to retain the right amount of water. “We predict that about 0.8 tons per hectare of crops will be lost in Sub-Saharan Africa every year until 2040.”
A disaster
The African continent could thus lose more than a third of its food production in less than a century. In a part of the world where the population is growing rapidly and there are already food shortages, this is a huge disaster. Immediate action is therefore necessary to counteract the withering of the soil, the researchers conclude.