What is desertification? Should we be concerned about the environment, including the constant degradation and destruction wrought by humans? What about the greenhouse effect, global warming, and climate change? These questions form the thesis of a new book, “The End of Desertification? Disputing Environmental Change in the Drylands,” a powerful, thought-provoking morality tale featuring a collection of essays authored by 20 professionals in the field.

Key Takeaways:

• It is quite a shock, then, to be presented with an abundance of evidence that desertification doesn’t happen, at least not in the way it has been explained. Scientifically, it is a meaningless and indefinable concept.
• In fact, the Sahel is now a great deal wetter, and for the very same reasons that caused the droughts. Though there are still year-to-year variations, there has been at least partial recovery of the rains since the mid 1990s.
• Saverio Kratli from the Commission on Nomadic Peoples says that instead of starting from the premise that “grazing is wrong, what can we do to stop it?” we should ask “what aspect of grazing is going wrong and how can we correct it?”.

“It is quite a shock, then, to be presented with an abundance of evidence that desertification doesn’t happen, at least not in the way it has been explained. Scientifically, it is a meaningless and indefinable concept.”

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/jul/14/desertification-an-ecological-reality-or-a-dangerous-myth