Desertification includes land degradation due to both climatic and anthropogenic causes, where land includes water, soil, and the biosphere. This book presents the most recent findings from the European Community's MEDALUS project, which was formed to understand and manage semi-arid environments that are undergoing great change. * Covers climate and land use processes and responses in the Mediterranean * First book to provide guidelines for the management of land degradation in Mediterranean environments * Based on first-hand experience of the problems by those responsible for solving them

This book provides a multi-lateral forum for cooperation, information exchange, and dialogue among the environmental, development, foreign and security policy communities within the Mediterranean Region and thus may provide a precedent for further cooperation and partnership, including other more advanced conferences and publications, on assessing the condition of the entire region and the subsequent impacts and linkages to environmental security.

This book proposes a comprehensive conceptualization of policy integration and negotiates pertinent theoretical, methodological and applied issues from the perspective of selected EU policies - rural development, regional development, transport, social, economic, environmental, water resources, and biodiversity policy.

Desertification of land degradation has become a major environmental issue in scientific and political circles. This product of the MEDALUS project forms an important part of the EU's initiative to manage changing semi-arid environments.

The question in the title of this book draws attention to the shortcomings of a concept that has become a political tool of global importance even as the scientific basis for its use grows weaker. The concept of desertification, it can be argued, has ceased to be analytically useful and distorts our understanding of social-environmental systems and their resiliency, particularly in poor countries with variable rainfall and persistent poverty. For better policy and governance, we need to reconsider the scientific justification for international attempts to combat desertification. Our exploration of these issues begins in the Sahel of West Africa, where a series of severe droughts at the end of the 20th century led to the global institutionalization of the idea of desertification. It now seems incontrovertible that these droughts were not caused primarily by local land use mismanagement, effectively terminating a long-standing policy and scientific debate. There is now an opportunity to treat this episode as an object lesson in the relationship between science, the formation of public opinion and international policy-making. Looking beyond the Sahel, the chapters in this book provide case studies from around the world that examine the use and relevance of the desertification concept. Despite an increasingly sophisticated understanding of dryland environments and societies, the uses now being made of the desertification concept in parts of Asia exhibit many of the shortcomings of earlier work done in Africa. It took scientists more than three decades to transform a perceived desertification crisis in the Sahel into a non-event. This book is an effort to critically examine that experience and accelerate the learning process in other parts of the world.

This book has been published by Allenvi (French National Alliance for Environmental Research) to coincide with the 22nd Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP22) in Marrakesh. It is the outcome of work by academic researchers on both sides of the Mediterranean and provides a remarkable scientific review of the mechanisms of climate change and its impacts on the environment, the economy, health and Mediterranean societies. It will also be valuable in developing responses that draw on “scientific evidence” to address the issues of adaptation, resource conservation, solutions and risk prevention. Reflecting the full complexity of the Mediterranean environment, the book is a major scientific contribution to the climate issue, where various scientific considerations converge to break down the boundaries between disciplines.

Desertification has re-emerged as a topic of global significance as a consequence of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development. When first addressed over a generation ago, attention was drawn to the compelling, spectacular images of sand dunes engulfing farmlands and parched cattle dying around wells. Research tended to focus on these events as unusual phenomena that involved the unfortunate collision of climate and `irrational' land use. Since then, the work of many researchers has shown us that desertification is a multifaceted problem that involves climatic, biogeochemical, political, and socio-economic processes that operate more or less continuously but at rates that vary in time and space. No attempts to arrest or reverse desertification that ignore this complexity are likely to succeed. In a single volume, `Desertification in Developed Countries' describes the multiple dimensions of desertification as well as the novel approaches that have been used to address it within the economies of developed countries. This is done from the perspectives and experiences of the numerous authors who have contributed to this book.