Above you see a picture that looks like a lifeless desert.
The picture shows a lake on the Italian island of Sicily in the summer of 2021. Lake Pozillo, located in Enna, Sicily, dried up almost completely during the heat wave that disciplined Southern Europe at the time.
There may be more and more landscapes like this in southern Europe in the future.
If climate emissions are not brought under control, large areas of southern Europe are threatened with desertification.
– Climate change is pushing North Africa’s desert climate towards Southern Europe, says Professor Emeritus of the Department of Forest Sciences at the University of Helsinki Markku Kanninen.
Desertification does not mean that Southern Europe will turn into a sand desert like the Sahara with dunes.
The term refers to the deterioration of the soil in dry areas and thus, for example, food production.
The most serious situation in Spain
When the soil deteriorates, the productivity of farmland decreases.
The phenomenon is typical for the Sahara region, says Kanninen, who is an expert in climate change and forest ecology.
Desertification is caused in addition to global warming unsustainable land usefor example water overuse, overgrazing and deforestation.
The map below shows how the desertification risk areas in Europe have grown in the 21st century.
The effects of desertification in Europe will be particularly strong in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria and Romania. This is what the EU Court of Auditors published in 2018 says statement.
The most serious situation is in Spain. The UN estimates that up to 75 percent of Spain’s surface area suffers from climatic conditions that can lead to desertification.
According to CSIC, Spain’s National Research Council, soil degradation has tripled in the last 10 years.
The risk of desertification increases in line with global warming.
Europe is warming up double speed compared to the rest of the world. The Mediterranean region is warming up particularly quickly.
With current actions and emissions, the world is on its way to a warming of up to three degrees by the end of the century compared to pre-industrial times.
– In that situation, there are already large areas where the risk of desertification is low or increased. Then even in northern Italy there is a risk of desertification, researcher Matti Kummu says.
Kummu is a professor of global water and food issues at Aalto University.
The map below shows how the risk of desertification increases in different climate scenarios.
After a warming of more than two degrees, all the effects of desertification will accelerate quickly, says Kummu.
Drought threatens food production
Southern European agriculture is already suffering from drought. In Spain, for example, the spring was catastrophic due to the drought.
Spain is one of the biggest food producers in Europe. The lack of rain at the beginning of the year affects 80 percent of crops and causes irreversible damage to more than five million hectares of farmland, says the Spanish agricultural trade association COAG.
In a normal year, the southern province of Jaen produces more than a fifth of the world’s olive oil, but this autumn the harvest will shrink to 20 percent of the usual.
Rice cultivation was given up completely for this year in the Seville areawhere rice has traditionally been widely cultivated.
There is not enough water for everything
Water resources are dwindling in desertifying areas. At the same time, the drought increases the need for artificial irrigation in agriculture.
However, industry, cities and people also need water, reminds the expert of the European Environment Agency.
Natural resource management expert Nihat Zal has studied desertification and water use. According to Zal, drought and heat threaten, for example, energy production, as significant amounts of water are needed for both cooling and, for example, hydropower production.
Already, for example, Italy has had to regulate water.
During the worst drought seasons, for example, filling swimming pools and washing cars are prohibited.
This photo shows Italy’s longest river, the Po, in March, when Italy suffered its worst drought in 70 years. The photo was taken in Casei Gerola in northern Italy.
Northern Italy is not yet a desertification risk area. However, the area will expand as the climate warms.
According to researcher Markku Kanninen, the water shortage will be one of the biggest problems facing Southern Europe.
– The heat evaporates water from lakes and rivers, and groundwater reserves dwindle as rains decrease. This will be a huge problem in the next decades in Europe as well.
The water shortage is already visible in people’s everyday life.
For example, in southern Spain, in Andalusia, water had to be brought by tanker trucks to the villages surrounding the city of Córdoba last spring due to the drought.
The drought exacerbates social tensions
Desertification and drought are not only environmental issues. This is what the professor of future studies at the University of Turku, who has a thesis on climate change, says Mark Wilenius.
– The water shortage exacerbates social tensions, says Wilenius.
Examples of this have already been seen outside of Europe.
Water has been a political bone of contention for a long time, for example in Chile, where the country’s scarce water resources have been privatized. In 2019, huge riots broke out in the country against economic inequality. One of the key demands of the demonstrators was better access to water and its more environmentally responsible use.
Perhaps the darkest example is the 12-year civil war in Syria.
– The beginning of the civil war in Syria is closely related to the drought that had prevailed in the country for years. It drove people from the countryside to the city. Absolute poverty and despair grew with it, Wilenius says.
Drought and the shortage of agricultural land aggravated by climate change have been considered as one of the factors in the conflicts in the Sahel region of Africa.
Fortunately, desertification is not an irreversible phenomenon, says University of Helsinki professor emeritus Markku Kanninen.
– In the Midwest of the United States, drought and poor land use led to farming becoming impossible in the 1930s. Today, the land is arable again.
However, restoring the productivity of the soil is expensive and more challenging the further desertification progresses.
– I would definitely rather emphasize the prevention of desertification, says Kanninen.
Video sources: Euronews, NOS
Angelika Tamasova, a researcher at the European Environment Agency, has also been interviewed for this article.