Desertification is actively degrading land on every inhabited continent, with the worst impacts concentrated in a belt stretching from North Africa through the Middle East and into South and East Asia. Up to 40% of the world’s land surface is now considered degraded, meaning it has lost significant biological or economic productivity. Roughly 3 billion people live on that affected land.
The Global Picture
Desertification hotspots, identified by declining vegetation productivity between the 1980s and 2000s, cover about 9.2% of the world’s drylands and affect roughly 500 million people. The regions with the highest numbers of people at risk are South and East Asia, the area surrounding the Sahara Desert, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. About half of the most vulnerable population lives in South Asia alone, followed by Central Asia, West Africa, and East Asia.
The causes vary by region but share common threads: prolonged drought amplified by climate change, overgrazing by livestock, deforestation, and unsustainable irrigation practices. Since 2023, some of the most widespread and damaging drought events in recorded history have compounded the problem, fueled by a powerful El Niño event layered on top of long-term warming trends.
Sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel
The Sahel, the semi-arid strip running across Africa just south of the Sahara, is one of the most iconic desertification zones on Earth. Countries like Niger, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, and northern Nigeria face relentless pressure from expanding sand, erratic rainfall, and growing populations competing for shrinking fertile land. Overgrazing and the clearing of trees for firewood and farming accelerate soil loss in a region where millions depend directly on rain-fed agriculture.
North of the Sahel, the fringes of the Sahara itself continue to shift. Libya, Egypt, and other North African nations deal with arid conditions creeping into previously marginal farmland. The African Union’s Great Green Wall initiative, a planned 8,000-kilometer band of restored land across the continent’s width, aims to push back against this trend, though progress has been uneven.
Central Asia and the Aral Sea
Central Asia hosts one of the world’s most dramatic examples of human-caused desertification. The Aral Sea, once one of the four largest lakes on the planet, has been shrinking for decades after Soviet-era irrigation projects diverted its feeder rivers to grow cotton. The ecosystems surrounding the sea have been nearly destroyed, and the region’s climate has shifted: summers are hotter, winters are cooler, and humidity has dropped sharply along the former coastline.
What was once seabed is now exposed desert that generates salt-laden dust storms, spreading contamination across surrounding farmland. In the Amudarya River delta alone, about 920 square kilometers of abandoned cropland have reverted to sparse vegetation. Soil salinization is the dominant form of degradation here. As groundwater levels rose from inefficient irrigation, secondary salinization spread across roughly 45% of the newly affected area. Salt carried downstream from irrigated fields compounds the damage, making the land increasingly difficult to farm.
China and East Asia
China faces desertification pressure along the edges of the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts in its northern and western regions. Provinces like Inner Mongolia, Gansu, and Xinjiang have historically lost productive grassland and farmland to encroaching sand. Wind erosion strips topsoil from overgrazed pastures, and prolonged droughts dry out already marginal land.
China has invested heavily in fighting back. The country’s decades-long tree-planting campaigns in the north represent one of the largest ecological restoration efforts ever attempted. As of late 2024, China completed a 3,046-kilometer ecological green barrier along the edge of the Taklamakan Desert, and recent satellite data suggests the Taklamakan has actually shrunk over the past two decades. These are rare bright spots in the global desertification picture, though the long-term durability of planted forests in arid zones remains an open question.
South Asia and the Middle East
South Asia carries the heaviest human burden from desertification. India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan all contain vast dryland areas where population density is high and water resources are under severe strain. In India, the Thar Desert’s margins in Rajasthan and parts of Gujarat are particularly vulnerable, with overgrazing, groundwater depletion, and deforestation all contributing. Pakistan’s Balochistan and Sindh provinces face similar pressures, worsened by irregular monsoon patterns that swing between drought and flooding.
Across the Arabian Peninsula and into Iran and Iraq, extreme heat and scarce water make desertification a constant threat. Parts of Iraq have lost significant agricultural capacity as rivers have diminished and salt concentrations in irrigated soil have risen. The combination of conflict, displacement, and infrastructure damage in the region has made land management even harder.
Southern Europe
Desertification is not limited to tropical or subtropical regions. In Europe, close to 23% of land in the southern, central, and eastern regions is considered vulnerable to degradation. Spain is the most affected Western European country, with large portions of its interior and southeast classified as at high risk. Parts of southern Italy, Greece, and Portugal face similar conditions, driven by recurring drought, intensive agriculture, wildfires, and soil erosion.
Southern Spain’s Almería and Murcia provinces already resemble semi-arid landscapes in places, and heatwaves are becoming more frequent across the Mediterranean basin. The pattern is gradually pushing northward: parts of southern France and the Balkans are beginning to show early signs of the same process.
The American West and Great Plains
The United States is not immune. The Southwest and Southern Plains have experienced persistent drought conditions, with extreme and exceptional drought emerging across multiple states. In 2025, rapid snowmelt hit Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, pushing river basins from above-average snowpack to snow drought conditions in under a month. Southern California was already extremely dry from lack of rainfall. South Texas received only 50 to 90% of its normal annual precipitation.
Record-breaking November temperatures hit Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, and Utah, drying out soils further. Snow drought, where warm temperatures reduce snowpack even when precipitation falls, was most severe across California’s Sierra Nevada, the Cascade Range in Washington and Oregon, and the Great Basin in Nevada. These conditions stress rangelands and farmland alike, echoing the Dust Bowl dynamics of the 1930s when poor land management combined with drought to strip topsoil across the Great Plains.
South America and the Amazon’s Edge
Parts of northeastern Brazil, Argentina’s Patagonia, and the dry Chaco region of Paraguay and Bolivia are experiencing desertification driven by deforestation, overgrazing, and climate variability. Perhaps more concerning is what is happening at the edges of the Amazon rainforest. As deforestation and fires intensify, the Amazon risks transitioning from a carbon sink to a carbon source, a shift that would reduce regional rainfall and accelerate drying across a vast area. The southeastern Amazon has already shown signs of this transition, with longer dry seasons and reduced moisture recycling.
Why It Keeps Spreading
Desertification feeds on itself. When vegetation is lost, soil dries out faster, reflects more heat, and generates less rainfall through evaporation. Exposed soil blows away in windstorms or washes away in flash floods, removing the nutrient-rich topsoil that plants need to reestablish. Each cycle of drought and degradation makes the next one harder to reverse.
The underlying drivers are remarkably consistent across continents: too many livestock on fragile grasslands, clearing trees faster than they can regrow, irrigation practices that poison soil with salt, and a climate that is delivering less predictable rain and more extreme heat. Population growth intensifies all of these pressures, particularly in regions where subsistence farming is the primary livelihood and people have few alternatives when the land stops producing.
Restoration is possible but slow. Regreening projects in parts of the Sahel, China’s green barriers, and soil conservation programs in Europe have all shown measurable results. The challenge is scale. With 40% of global land already degraded, the gap between the rate of damage and the pace of repair continues to widen.