How many people live in drylands

CO2 emissions from fossil fuels by region. Coastal population and altered coastal zones. Coastal population and altered land cover in coastal zones km of coastline. Coastal population and shoreline degradation. Comparison of per capita water use by region.

Conflict in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and refugee settlement in Guinea. Declines in carbon in living biomass and in extent of forest. Defining and measuring biodiversity. Degree of protection of terrestrial ecoregions and large marine ecosystems per cent. Disaster preparedness and well-being. Domestic extraction used in EU compared to imports of industrial minerals and ores. Ecological creditors and debtors. Effect of international agreements on the predicted abundance of ODS in the stratosphere — Examples of current and possible future impacts and vulnerabilities associated with climate variability and change in Africa.

Exploitation status of marine fish stocks. Global and regional targets and monitoring programs. Global glacier mass — annual variability and cumulative values. Global total equivalent carbon emissions from anthropogenic sources by sector. Gross domestic product — purchasing power parity per capita. Harmful effects of ecosystem changes on human health. Highest risk hot spots by natural hazard type. Household final consumption expenditure European Union. International governance-environment-development-trade interlinkages Notes: Norms, procedures, rules, and principles are operating between regimes.

Linkages and feedback loops among desertification, global climate change and biodiversity loss. Urban population growth is occurring in cities of all sizes A summary of global urban population growth in cities of different sizes. Skip to main content. Aridity and Urban Population. Source: Balk D. Aridity and Drought. Global Patterns of Human Domination. For example, the area classified as drylands in the period to was 4 per cent larger than that for the period to Each of the subtypes of dryland region — hyperarid, arid, semiarid and dry subhumid — has expanded, although the largest expansion has been in semi-arid regions, which now account for more than half of total dryland expansion.

Semiarid regions on five continents have all expanded but East Asia accounts for nearly 50 per cent of this global growth. The landscapes of drylands are characterized by low vegetation cover, low nutrition content of soil, and low capacity for water conservation. These areas are already home to disproportionality more poor and vulnerable people; environmental changes including rising temperatures, water shortages and soil loss will exacerbate poverty and may stimulate large scale migrations.

Recent findings indicate that long-term trends in aridity are mainly attributable to increased greenhouse gas emissions, while anthropogenic aerosols exert small effects but alter its attributions. Meanwhile, human-induced land use or land cover change has likely contributed to aridity trends on regional scales. Research has shown that the greatest atmospheric warming over land during the last years was over drylands; this accounted for more than half of all continental warming.

However, the global pattern and interdecadal variability of aridity changes are modulated by oceanic oscillations. The different phases of those oceanic oscillations induce significant changes in land-sea and north-south thermal contrasts, which in turn alter global changes in temperature and precipitation.

So far, we are still not in the position to distinguish quantitatively between increasing aridity caused by natural variability in the climate system and the changes caused by human activities.