Aggravated risk of soil erosion with global warming – A global meta-analysis

Abstract

Climate warming has widely variable effects on terrestrial ecosystems, and warming-induced changes in soil erosion could accelerate or slow down future warming. Numerous methods and models have been developed to evaluate soil erosion. However, the quantification of the impact of climate change on soil erosion and selection of the most appropriate soil erosion model for a particular study area remain unclear. With the intensification of climate warming, solutions to these problems are becoming increasingly more important. In this study, we performed a meta-analysis of research on global soil erosion to verify the effects of climate warming on soil erosion. Four databases were searched for relevant peer-reviewed publications from 1980 to 2019 using five keywords. The results showed that soil erosion has increased worldwide, mainly in semiarid areas (p < 0.001). While soil erosion has decreased at high latitudes, it has increased at middle and low latitudes. Different soil erosion models provided significantly different simulation results. Among various models, the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation and Wind Erosion Equation models showed the highest simulation accuracies for water erosion (p < 0.001) and wind erosion (p < 0.05), respectively. At present, the factors driving soil erosion under climate warming remain highly uncertain. In addition, differences in underlying surfaces and the number of study samples also affect soil erosion assessments. In the future, interactions between climate warming and soil erosion (especially in wind erosion models) should be studied in more detail, and the relationship between the UN Sustainable Development Goals and soil erosion should be further considered.