“…Scholars all over the world have identified key factors responsible for this global peril such as natural vegetation and climatic factors (Bezerra et al, 2020; Sun, Gao, & Li, 2014; Zhang & Huisingh, 2018). Several studies have stressed the importance of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), albedo and net primary productivity (NPP) as the most direct indicators of desertification (Jiang, Jiapaer, Bao, Li, & Guo, 2019; Vorovencii, 2017), but these take under consideration only a few of the factors operating or merely individual ones (Kundu, Patel, Saha, & Dutta, 2017; Singh et al, 2016; Sun et al, 2014) when identifying the areas affected by desertification, underestimating the possibility of a graver scenario that may arise due to the combined effects of those individual factors.…”