Contemporary Environmental Changes over the Dry Land Belt of Northern
Eurasia and Their Consequences
Abstract
Our presentation represents a brief overview of recent climatic and
environmental changes over the Dry Lands of Northern Eurasia. The Dry
Land Belt (DLB) in Northern Eurasia is the largest contiguous dryland on
Earth. During the last century, changes here have included land use
change (e.g., rapid virgin land development in the mid of the 1950s; cf.
Figure 1), resource extraction, rapid institutional shifts (e.g.,
collapse of the Soviet Union), climatic changes, and natural
disturbances. These factors intertwine, overlap, sometimes mitigate but
sometimes feedback upon each other to exacerbate their synergistic and
cumulative effects. Thus, it is important to document properly each of
these external and internal factors and to characterize structural
relationships among them in order to develop better approaches to
alleviating negative consequences of these regional environmental
changes. This paper addresses the climatic changes observed over the DLB
in recent decades and outlines possible links of these changes (both
impacts and feedbacks) with other external and internal factors of
contemporary regional environmental change and human activities within
the DLB.