Gaining better insight into land degradation
Extreme weather conditions, such as droughts are considered to be threatening for the environment, ecological systems and human life. Climate change during the past decades has increased the severity of such events in many regions, in particular of the Mediterranean and the Sahel. In addition, land use in these regions is continuously subject to change due to multiple economical, social, and environmental factors. This, in combination with the critical aridity phenomena has led to aggravated and extensive land degradation results in these regions. This EC funded project investigated the wider impacts of land degradation on the climate in the Iberian Peninsula region. In this way, researchers would gain a better understanding of the influence of scale and degree of degradation on the climatic response. More specifically, this project resulted in many interesting findings, such as how the scale and amount of land degradation affects climate change, including precipitation, evaporation and rainfall events. Other significant factors that were studied included the location of the degraded region and the large atmospheric variations in climate. Within this context they also studied the ways that atmosphere interacts with land surfaces especially in semi-arid regions. In this way they were able to understand the climate's response related to land cover, such as vegetation's effects on precipitation at short time scales. These mechanisms draw attention to the importance of the land surface description for simulating current climate with the aid of atmospheric models. Thus, researchers are expected to be able to ensure comprehensive information to be exploited for the accurate prediction of the environmental consequences of land degradation.
