Dryland belt of Northern Eurasia: contemporary environmental changes and their consequences

Abstract

The dryland 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. expansion of croplands and cities), resource extraction (e.g. coal, ores, oil, and gas), rapid institutional shifts (e.g. collapse of the Soviet Union), climatic changes, and natural disturbances (e.g. wildfires, floods, and dust storms). These factors intertwine, overlap, and sometimes mitigate, but can sometimes feedback upon each other to exacerbate their synergistic and cumulative effects. Thus, it is important to properly document each of these external and internal factors and to characterize the 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 feedback) with other external and internal factors of contemporary regional environmental changes and human activities within the DLB.