The world could turn into a desert

Lewie Hill
Nov 1 · 2 min read

Who, What, Why, Where, When?

Desertification is where fertile land turns into a hot desert, from drought, deforestation or over-farming. There are already hot deserts on or near the tropics, but soon there could be even more, including parts of the UK.

The graph above shows where there already is hot deserts in grey and where they could be in mint, yellow, orange and red. From — https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/nedc/training/soil/?

Scientists and geologists are showing that human activity is the cause or a catalyst of their formation. Climate change, deforestation and overgrazing (farming) are all examples of how we worsen desertification because they all cause soil erosion, therefore making the soil quality too poor to farm with.

Photo by Ivars Krutainis on Unsplash

What can we do?

To help keep up soil quality, we can plant loads of trees. The tree’s roots keep the soil together, reducing erosion. Many charities plant trees to save the environment, for example, #teamtrees which have already planted 11M trees plants a tree for each USD donated, with big names like Elon Musk and Tobi Lütke donating $1M and $1,000,001 respectively. People are also using drip irrigation for farming and using stones to slow water when running over the surface of the soil so its more evenly spread.

What happens if we do nothing?

If we sit on our arses and do absolutely nothing, many nations who rely on farming, like India will not be able to do so effectively with such poor soil quality. This means a lot of companies multinational companies cannot function. For example: India’s agriculture industry is important because it produces 60% of global textiles, although the whole of India is under risk.

Sources BBC & Wikipedia — This article is written as homework/ revision

Lewie Hill

Written by

I am a 15 year old boy who loves tech and random facts. I hope you have as much fun reading my articles as I had writing them.

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