Global Overheating Is Making The Land Drier And Saltier – CleanTechnica

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There are many things farmers put on their crops to encourage them to grow, things like nitrogen and phosphorous. Salt, however, is not one of them. There are some salt-tolerant plants that are used for beautification in coastal communities, things like bromilliads, bougainvillea, and sawgrass, but you won’t find any of them on the menu at restaurants. There are very few cookbooks on global bookshelves featuring recipes for salt-tolerant plants. If the land becomes salty, it is pretty much unusable for agriculture. That means fewer crops and higher prices, which in turn lead to more hungry migrants in search of food.

According to the United Nations Convention To Combat Desertification, as the Earth gets hotter, the ground becomes drier and saltier. That will have profound consequences for the more that 8 billion people who currently live on this fragile planet. Nearly a third of them already live in places where water is getting more scarce and the ability to raise crops and livestock is becoming more difficult. That trend is accelerating. The latest report from UNCCD finds that global heating has made 77 percent of the arable land on Earth drier over the past three decades.

A similar analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations found that about 10 percent of the world’s soils are affected by excess salt, with another 2.5 billion acres at risk. Together, the two reports sound an urgent alarm. Unless the world curbs emissions, these shifts will continue, with grave implications. “Without concerted efforts, billions face a future marked by hunger, displacement, and economic decline,” said Nichole Barger, an aridlands ecologist who works with the UNCCD.

Global Overheating Is Already Affecting Food Production

Some 7.6 percent of the planet’s land was remade by climate change between 1990 and 2020, with most of the impacted areas shifting from humid landscapes to drylands — defined as an area where 90 percent of rainfall evaporates before reaching the ground. Together, they cover a geographic expanse larger than Canada, researchers found, and in 2020 were home to about 30 percent of the world’s population. Unless the world sharply limits emissions, that proportion could more than double by the end of the century. By that point, more than two thirds of land worldwide, with the exception of Greenland and Antarctica, is expected to store less water, according to the FAO study.

These changes are not limited to regions already considered dry, or expected to experience desertification. When modeling global high-emissions scenarios, the researchers found similar changes could occur in the Midwest, central Mexico, and the Mediterranean, to name three examples. The researchers have no expectation that this trend will reverse.

Hannah Waterhouse, a soil and water scientist at the University of California at Santa Cruz told Grist recently that it is “important, and unnerving to emphasize” that this expansion occurred under conditions that aren’t nearly as hot as those expected in the future as the Earth continues to warm. That suggests the problem will only escalate and, as food and water grow more scarce, usher in issues like widespread conflict, she said. “We can look to current geopolitical and ecological events that are playing out currently to understand what we can expect in the future. Think of what is occurring in Sudan right now, where climate change is exacerbating resource scarcity, which is interacting in governance and geopolitics in violent outcomes for civilians.”

Aridity vs. Drought

Aridity is not to be confused with drought. Drought is best described as a sudden and startling, but temporary, water shortage often caused by low precipitation, high temperatures, little humidity, and unusual wind patterns. Arid regions, on the other hand, experience persistent, long-term climatic conditions in which evaporation exceeds rainfall, creating conditions in which it can be difficult to sustain life. It is much more subtle than a drought, but no less significant. “Droughts end,” Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UNCCD, said in a statement. “When an area’s climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost. The drier climates now affecting vast lands across the globe will not return to how they were, and this change is redefining life on Earth.”

Meanwhile, the wealthiest people on Earth are rushing to Mar-A-Loco to suck up to the newly anointed emperor of America, Donald the First. None of them will be boring the great man with concerns about alterations in the Earth’s climate. Instead, they will be jockeying for position at the banquet that will carve up what is left of American democracy so it can be sold to the highest bidder. The future will see more oil and gas production, not less, as the oligarchs laugh all the way to the bank.

Expanding drylands are widely considered the biggest contributor to the degradation of Earth’s agricultural systems and difficulty producing enough food. Such conditions also have been linked to loss of gross domestic product, large-scale migration, adverse health impacts, and shorter lifespans. They also intensify wildfires, sand storms, and dust storms while degrading ecosystems, and they promote erosion and the salinization of water and soil.

Climate change is already hampering food production, leaving one in 11 people worldwide hungry last year, and research suggests the problem will intensify, particularly in much of Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Under the business-as-usual emissions scenario, sub-Saharan Africa could lose as much as 22 percent of its current crop production capacity by 2050. The production of staple food crops grown in regions highly susceptible to aridity, such as soybeans, wheat, and rice, could plummet worldwide as well.

Everything Is Connected

The rapid expansion of the world’s drylands is “100 percent interconnected” with the coinciding surge in saltier soils, said Maria Konyushkova, a soil scientist at the Food and Agriculture Organization and lead author of the report the UN agency released December 11, 2024. The more arid an area is, the less freshwater is available. That requires farmers to rely upon brackish water, which makes the land saltier still.

While water soluble salt is a component of all soils, too much of it impairs the ability of  plants to water absorb water, which inhibits their growth. High salinity also changes the structure of the soil, making it more prone to erosion. All of this diminishes soil fertility, and could lead to yield losses as high as 70 percent for crops like rice and beans in the countries most impacted, the researchers found. Roughly 10 percent of the world’s irrigated cropland, and a similar proportion of its rain-fed cropland, has already been impacted by this trend.

Ten countries, including China, Russia, and the United States, account for 70 percent of the planet’s salt-affected soils. This costs the global agriculture sector at least $27 billion every year. If the world continues to warm at its current rate, past research has estimated that more than 50 percent of the world’s cropland would be similarly impacted by 2050 and leading to lower yields that are already driving rising food costs and hunger rates. “We depend on land for our survival,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said recently. “Yet we treat it like dirt.”

Adding Up The Costs

Previous UNCCD reports found that degradation of the land could cost the global economy $23 trillion by 2050. Combating it would cost roughly $4.6 trillion. The agency has said at least $2.6 trillion will be needed for restoration and resilience purposes by 2030. At the most recent world conference, wealthy nations pledged $12 billion. While that may seem like a lot of money, it is less than a piss hole in the snow compared to what is needed.

Konyushkova considers the two reports by UNCCD and FAO an urgent call for governments worldwide to prioritize investing in resilience efforts to manage what is clearly becoming a crisis. “All the trends show that the freshwater resources will be depleting … but we have so many approaches to adapt,” she said. “We just need to start doing it right now, because it’s already here. Even if governments don’t always understand, it’s already here, and deteriorating.”

What will be the result of these two reports? Will the world come together to demand an end to the scourge of fossil fuels, which would be the logical thing to do? Or will it do the same thing the oil companies did when their own scientists warned them of the consequences of burning fossil fuels more than 50 years ago? CleanTechnica readers already know the answers to those questions.