Tiempo Climate Newswatch

June 17th is World Desertification Day. This year's theme is "The Beauty of Deserts – The Challenge of Desertification".

The world's deserts are facing dramatic changes as a result of climate change, water demands, tourism and salt contamination, according the World Deserts Outlook, published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) on World Environment Day, 5th June. "Across the planet, poverty, unsustainable land management and climate change are turning drylands into deserts, and desertification in turn exacerbates and leads to poverty," said United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. "There is also mounting evidence that dryland degradation and competition over increasingly scarce resources can bring communities into conflict," he continued. The report argues that global and regional instability is altering desert landscapes as more military training grounds, prisons and refugee holding stations are built.

UNEP launched a guide on tourism and deserts on the same day. "The guide seeks to promote desert tourism as a leading source of sustainable development in the countries concerned," said UNEP's Monique Barbut. "With careful planning, tour operators can help mitigate the seasonal nature of desert tourism by generating positive social, economic, and environmental impacts that will offer year-round benefits for the communities living in desert destinations." The guide notes that desert tourism is growing quickly but that the tolerance threshold for visitor numbers in the fragile desert ecosystems is not high.

More information

• Reuters
• Press release, Global Deserts Outlook, UNEP
• Press release, Tourism and Deserts, UNEP

• Global Deserts Outlook, UNEP
• Download Tourism and Deserts, UNEP
• Deserts and Drylands, Special issue of Our Planet, UNEP
• On the Web: Drylands and desertification

An American team of researchers has developed a new process for studying complex drylands and desert landscapes. The team was led by Debra Peters, a research scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service, at the Jornada Experimental Range in southern New Mexico, where the research was conducted. "Previously we looked at small areas and used that information to make guesses about the large area, to extrapolate to the big area, and that doesn't work very well when things are really complex and so then we shifted to say, really, the complexity is what's interesting and important," reported Peters.

The research has been based on a six-step approach in order to give full weight to the myriad, complex influences on the system: "look up" to assess the broad scale; "look back" in time to determine the role of past events on the present landscape; "look around" to consider adjacent spaces and the influence of wind, water and animals as connecting transport vectors; "look down" to determine fine-scale properties and processes of the landscape; then integrate the information from broad scale to fine scale to determine the most important influences; and, finally, "look forward" in time to the effects of variable environmental factors from the current landscape to the future.

More information

• Science Daily

• On the Web: Drylands and desertification

Construction has begun on what it is claimed will be the world's largest solar power plant. The power plant is located near Serpa, 200km south of Lisbon, in Portugal's Alentejo region. Generating eleven megawatts of electricity, it will consist of 52,000 photovoltaic modules on a 60-hectare hillside. The plant will use PowerLight's PowerTracker technology so that the photovoltaic modules follow the sun.

According to Piero Dal Maso, of the renewable energy company Catavento, the plant "should provide energy enough for 8,000 homes. It will save 30,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, so that is probably around one per cent of domestic consumption of Portugal." An even larger solar power station has been proposed for the same region. Visible from space, that installation could generate 116 megawatts of electricity.

More information

• BBC
• The Engineer Online

• Solarbuzz
• Guardian Unlimited