Reading 9 – Deserts & Desertification

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  • This is additional reading material for the Animation degree programme at QUST/Bradford
  • It is uncontroversial to say that reading is probably the best way to extend your vocabulary and the more you read, the greater your vocabulary will be
  • This week the main text below is an abstract from an academic report so you can see how important the AWL vocabulary (in blue)  is in academic writing
  • IT IS PROBABLY EASIER FOR YOU TO READ THE LINKED ARTICLES FIRST

Useful Links (recommended reading)

  1. This National Geographic article provides a helpful overview of deserts: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/deserts/
  2. This Encyclopaedia Britannica entry is useful (read up to ORIGINS): https://www.britannica.com/science/desert
  3. Let’s not neglect the polar regions, which actually contain the world’s largest deserts: https://www.worldwildlife.org/habitats/polar-regions
  4. Would you like to read about the problems that China has with deserts? Try this report: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielrechtschaffen/2017/09/18/how-chinas-growing-deserts-are-choking-the-country/#51c7cdb45d1b

Here is the Abstract from a much longer report on the desertification process in China:

Desertification is the result of complex interactions among various factors, including climate change and human activities. However, previous research generally focused on either meteorological factors associated with climate change or human factors associated with human activities and lacked quantitative assessments of their interaction combined with long-term monitoring. Thus, the roles of climate change and human factors in desertification remain uncertain. To understand the factors that determine whether mitigation programs can contribute to desertification control and vegetation cover improvements in desertified areas of China and the complex interactions that affect their success, we used a pooled regression model based on panel data to calculate the relative roles of climate change and human activities on the desertified area and on vegetation cover (using the normalized-difference vegetation index, NDVI, which decreases with increasing desertification) from 1983 to 2012. We found similar effect magnitudes for socioeconomic and environmental factors for NDVI but different results for desertification: socioeconomic factors were the dominant factor that affected desertification, accounting for 79.3% of the effects. Climate change accounted for 46.6 and 20.6% of the effects on NDVI and desertification, respectively. Therefore, desertification control programs must account for the integrated effects of both socioeconomic and natural factors.

Source:

Qi Feng, Hua Ma, Xuemei Jiang, Xin Wang & Shixiong Cao (2015) What Has Caused Desertification in China? in Scientific Reports volume 5, Article number: 15998 (2015)

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