The critical issues facing these populations and their governing bodies are numerous and include the following: Water/air quality and pollution nutrition and food supplies congestion of communication and transportation systems energy resources and consumption noise, stress, and access to open spaces and recreation areas responsive education, social, and criminal justice systems sufficient employment and housing opportunities and brutal commercial and residential development. Errki Vauramo, in Clinical Engineering Handbook, 2004 Healthy EnvironmentĪccording to the Agenda 21 statement from the UNCED (1992) Rio de Janeiro environment summit, 60% of the Earth's population will live in cities in the year 2050. UNCOD, and the National Plans of Action agreed to at that meeting, still viewed people as the main agents of desertification. This alarm stoked the United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNCOD), held in Nairobi in 1977. In dryland Africa, severe drought and famine in the 1970s, following decades of good rainfall, again revived the desertification debate, with depressing reports of desert advance appearing in scientific publications and the media. Yet a member of this Commission, the influential French botanist Auguste Aubréville, held to the ‘desert advance’ hypothesis, and first used the term ‘desertification’ in 1949 (Warren 1996). They saw degradation as place-specific and treatable. An Anglo–French Forestry Commission toured the Niger–Nigeria border in 1936–7, and their conclusions were far more circumspect. Stebbing, a forester, identified the causes of degradation in British West Africa to be shortened agricultural fallow periods, shifting agriculture, and overgrazing (Stebbing 1935). With these narratives very much in mind, E. He, and others, believed they had evidence of widespread environmental degradation in the drylands of the Old World, whose cause, as in the mid-western states, was also thought to be mismanagement. Sears' Deserts on the March ( 1949) evoked accusations of widespread anthropogenic degradation. These early judgments preceded what environmental historians are now discovering to have been a much more traumatic event, the American ‘Dust Bowl’ of the 1930s. It was concluded that the Sahara had grown, and was still growing, owing to poor land management, which had worsened under the colonial regime. It was then that France began the first studies of the process in West Africa, finding evidence of mobile sand dunes, human fossil remains in now-dry areas, and declining annual rainfall. Scientists were exercised as early as the 1920s with the ‘the advance and spread of the desert’ in Africa. Of course, uncertainties abound, the circumstances fostering reversible or irreversible change, the resiliency of different semi-arid environments, the different roles of natural and anthropogenic driving forces, and the synergies among these elements. The ‘ Agenda 21’ document of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) defined desertification as ‘land degradation in arid, semi-arid, and dry, subhumid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities.’ The processes of degradation were said to be soil erosion, nutrient depletion, crust formation, salinization, reduction in pasture and agricultural productivity, loss of biodiversity, and reduction in vegetation cover in susceptible drylands. Warren, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2001 1.1 History and Definitions
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