“Meteorological droughts have not shown substantial changes on a global scale in at least the last 120 years.” In 2022, while developing projections on droughts in the Anthropocene, a Franco-Spanish research team came to this conclusion. The data was clear and yet nothing was.

Because in the face of evidence that the severity of droughts has increased, it is as firm as the previous one. What was happening here?

Where does the problem in the southeast come from? For years, reports from the Arid Zone Experimental Station from the CSIC have been warning us that large areas of the southeast are at certain risk of completely degrading. The data corroborate this: while, between 2000 and 2010, the area of ​​active degradation represented 1% of the Spanish territory; Between 2020 and 2020, the area grew up to 3% and everything seemed to indicate that we would reach the end of the 2020s above 5%.

That is to say, we have a desertification problem: not only are we losing fertile soils at a rapid pace, not only is the vegetation cover being destroyed, the land is being eroded and we are suffering enormous water stress; We are also seeing how ecosystems are losing the ability to self-regulate.

It’s not something specifically ours… According to the estimates of the UNCCD Global Mechanism (the international organization in charge of combating desertification), during the first two decades of the century, 24 billion tons of fertile soil were lost annually worldwide. That is, the equivalent of size of all agricultural land in the United States.

…but it does affect us especially. Because Spain has regions with enormous “climatic susceptibility to desertification”: almost 100% of the Murcia territory is in that situation. In the same way as 95% of Castilla-La Mancha and 90% of Extremadura.

So… What is happening? As They remembered these days in El Sudeste a Secasthe key to the problem is “atmospheric evaporative demand” (AED). That is, the ability of the atmosphere to extract moisture from the soil.

The AED “has increased drastically due to global warming” and causes “agricultural and ecological droughts to worsen, even in areas with few alterations in precipitation.”

In our case, an increase in the AED would impact “directly on soil evaporation, reservoirs and crop water stress.” Above all, in places where the thaw can’t counter the effects of drought.

Learn to look from climate change. Because, at the end of the day, what we are beginning to see is that, in a context of climate change, even “business as usual” can generate very different results. Very very different.

Image | Copernicus / Dietmar Reichle

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