Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The transformation of arable or habitable land to desert, as by a change in climate or destructive land use.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun Process by which a
geographic region becomes adesert . The change may result from natural changes inclimate or byhuman activity.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun the gradual transformation of habitable land into desert; is usually caused by climate change or by destructive use of the land
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The term desertification was coined to convey this drama of pressing and interconnected issues in drylands, but human-induced land degradation extends beyond drylands or forests.
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The threat of desertification is significant for over a third (35 percent) of Greek land and somewhat less so for another section accounting for half (49 percent) of the country, according to Constantinos Kosmas of Athens†™ s Agriculture University.
Sustainable Design Update » Blog Archive » Signs of Climate Change 2006
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Protecting forests to stop desertification is a major step towards strengthening our common global environment.
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Nutrition: Sub-Saharan countries are affected by increasing degradation of the environment -- which we commonly call desertification -- due to frequent droughts, cutting down of trees, soil erosion and poverty.
RHRealityCheck.org 2008
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First, a decades-long drought turned fertile lands in the north of Darfur into desert (in a process known as desertification), which made land use and land rights much more contentious.
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In the Sahelian zone, such plantations are not established on an industrial basis and are less important, except in Senegal where plantations are created to stop desertification, which is a pressing ecological problem.
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Let me speak a moment about desertification, which is a long word that I suspect few people here are familiar with and few are experts in.
Press Briefing By David Sandalow ITY National Archives 1998
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When I visited the Wodaabe Tribe in the Sahal they had never heard of the word desertification but they knew better than anyone that their soil was exhausted.
We Do It Our Way 1991
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A Global effect of climate change known as desertification is advancing the Gobi and currently threatens more than 400 million people in several Chinese provinces.
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When the trees are decimated in a region, a process called "desertification" tends to occur downwind because the trees are no longer there to pump groundwater back into the atmosphere to fall back to Earth as additional rainfall at some down wind location.
Matthew Stein: The Perfect Storm: Six Trends Converging on Collapse Matthew Stein 2010
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