Evaluation of Environmental Damage Associated with Desertification of Arid Territories on the South of European Russia

Desertification still remains an unsolved environmental problem that affects 1.5 billion people and 25% of the arid lands in the world and that represents a critical threat to the biodiversity, socioeconomic development, and sustainability of arid regions. At the local scale, desertification often results from unsustainable land management. Agricultural lands subjected to this process are intensively used for mass production of food. Despite the importance of this environmental problem, there is still no consensus concerning an accurate quantitative estimation of the desertification process in a regional scale. The lack of a clear definition and common standard methods for determination of the causes and consequences of this destructive process represents a significant obstacle to the development of appropriate strategies to control desertification. Using the method of compensatory costs and a semi-desert zone as an example, the environmental damage that occurs due to land degradation and is manifested via the loss of fertility (loss of organic and soil nutrients), has been evaluated. Such damage is determined not least because of a long-term climatic trend indicating increased aridity of the studied region. Based on the recent data, the area of agricultural lands in the south of European Russia characterized by a predominance of light chestnut soils and subjected to desertification has been determined. The regional costs for fertilizers required to compensate for the lost fertility of these natural resources have been calculated, as well as the volume of losses of their annual productivity. The resulting estimates can be used by policy makers as an important quantitative tool for determining the scale and the costs of desertification in terms of justifying the corresponding reduction of a productive potential of arid lands.