Andreas Michaelis

Deforestation and desertification. Critical development issues? Andreas Michaelis

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Development Politics, grade: 1,5, University of Warwick, language: English, comment: "Erasmus-English" , abstract: Drought and desertification threaten the livelihood of more than 1.2 billion people across 110 countries. Around 2 billion people live in "dry-lands", which occupy around 40 per cent of the earth´s land surface, while 90 per cent of the people who live in drylands are from DC (Kingsbury et al. 2012,314). Drought and desertification effect strongly the development of a country. The town Baga in Nigeria, was once a fisherman´s village. It was at the coast of the Tschad lake, now it is more than 30km away from the lake. The increasing desertification of the region at Tschad lake drove the city to become agriculturally centred, the outcome of desertification for the local population is significant. This essay argues for a strong impact of "environmental" problems like desertification and deforestation on the development of a country. This essay wants to highlight the importance of these problems for development science. The key argument of this essay is the reciprocal influence between development and environmental problems. Development often generates environmental problems, which in turn aggravates future development.