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Word day Thursday: Desertification

Term and pronunciation: Desertification
Etymology From Latin: A compound word made up of 'desert' meaning uninhabited and 'fication' an English suffix, using 'i' to connect the two.

Meaning
The expansion of formation of a desert.
While there are a few definitions of what makes a desert; primarily deserts can be either dry and hot, for example the Sahara desert, or dry and cold, such as Antarctica.

Usage and examples
Deserts can be created by:

• Climate change (shifts in major planetary pressure and wind systems)
• Poor land-use policy (removal of vegetation by overgrazing, leading to erosion and removal of top soil - or, indeed, deforestation)
• A complex interaction between the two (for example whereby overgrazing changes the albedo effect favouring increased dryness.

In the book to the BBC series Africa, Michael Bright discusses desertification in Africa. He notes that desertification was spotted in action in Africa in the 1940s. Andre Aubraville saw the process occurring due to the removal of trees in the buffer zone the desert to the north and the savannah to the south. To counter this there are many projects in Africa to replant trees, including the Great Green Wall initiative. A project that aims to reduce the "degradation of soils in the Sahel-Saharan region, focusing on a strip of land of 15 km (9 mi) wide and 7,100 km (4,400 mi) long from Dakar to Djibouti" (GEF, 2013) 

History
The first evidence that the OED record is that in the Annales Algériennes de Géographie in 1968. However, the BBC Africa book records Andre Aubreville using the term in 1949.

Bibliography
"desertification, n.". OED Online. December 2012. Oxford University Press. 27 February 2013 <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/50784?redirectedFrom=desertification&>.
Allaby, M. (2012) Oxford Dictionary of Plant Sciences, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
"desertification". Wikipedia.org. February 2012. Oxford University Press. 27 February <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification#Causes >
"The Great Green Wall Initiative". GEF. Oxford University Press. 27 February 2013 <http://www.thegef.org/gef/great-green-wall>
Bright, M. (2012) Africa: Eye to eye with the unknown, London, Quercus Editions