Land and Soil Degradation Assessments in Mediterranean Europe – the GMES-Project LADAMER

During the 20th century, purely climate climatic factors were rarely responsible for desertification in the Mediterranean region, because droughts are relatively short-lived. Present land degradation in Northern Mediterranean countries is partially due to dramatic land use changes that occurred during the second half of this century and which in many cases lead to an unstable state of ecosystems. Natural and agricultural ecosystems may be affected, but in most cases they recover easily. Socioeconomic disturbances, particularly when they occur combined with climatic fluctuations, become the main drivers of desertification in the area. They affect water balances and land degradation through changes in land-use patterns. In particular, large areas of Mediterranean rangelands are affected from transitional processes that cause conflicts between past and present land uses or economic and ecological priorities, i.e. between optimised productivity and ecosystem conservation. Desertification, as a specific expression of land degradation processes, is a concept applied by scientists and policy makers after droughts threatened the Sahel in the last quarter of the 20th century, defined by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) as “the degradation of the land in arid, semi-arid and dry-sub-humid areas, as a result of several factors, including climatic change and human activities”. The dominant symptomatic character of this definition does not account for the underlying processes of the phenomenon. The consequence is that the popular meaning of desertification is often associated with a catalogue of environmental calamities rather than specific distress in the human population-renewable resources system. In such conditions both prospects and mitigation become extremely uncertain.