Is desertification a meaningless concept ?

Is desertification a meaningless concept ? 

A new book asserts that desertification is a meaningless concept and the policies to reverse it are doing more harm than good. This is the thesis of a new book by 20 experts in the field. The End of Desertification? Disputing Environmental Change in the Drylands is a collection of essays edited by Roy Behnke and the veteran drylands expert Mike Mortimore. Published with the help of the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development and Tufts University in the US, it pulls no punches.

It is quite a shock to be presented with an abundance of evidence that desertification doesn’t happen, at least not in the way it has been explained. Scientifically, it is a meaningless and indefinable concept. The so-called desertification of the Sahel that created the scare happened for quite other reasons, and wasn’t irreversible.

The notion of widespread, catastrophic environmental degradation was, the authors say, a non-event. And the great Sahelian droughts of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s did not happen because of over-exploitation of land but because global climate changes brought about by fluctuations in the composition of atmospheric greenhouse gases and particulates. Though there are still year-to-year variations, there has been at least partial recovery of the rains since the mid 1990s.  In fact, the Sahel is now a great deal wetter, and for the very same reasons that caused the droughts.