From Historical Narratives to Circular Economy: De-Complexifying the “Desertification” Debate

Abstract

Assuming the importance of a “socioeconomic mosaic” influencing soil and land degradation at the landscape scale, spatial contexts should be considered in the analysis of desertification risk as a base for the design of appropriate counteracting strategies. A holistic approach grounded on a multi-scale qualitative and quantitative assessment is required to identify optimal development strategies regulating the socioeconomic dimensions of land degradation. In the last few decades, the operational thinking at the base of a comprehensive, holistic theory of land degradation evolved toward many different conceptual steps. Moving from empirical, qualitative and unstructured frameworks to a more structured, rational and articulated thinking, such theoretical approaches have been usually oriented toward complex and non-linear dynamics benefiting from progressive and refined approximations. Based on these premises, eleven disciplinary approaches were identified and commented extensively on in the present study, and were classified along a gradient of increasing complexity, from more qualitative and de-structured frameworks to more articulated, non-linear thinking aimed at interpreting the intrinsic fragmentation and heterogeneity of environmental and socioeconomic processes underlying land degradation. Identifying, reviewing and classifying such approaches demonstrated that the evolution of global thinking in land degradation was intimately non-linear, developing narrative and deductive approaches together with inferential, experimentally oriented visions. Focusing specifically on advanced economies in the world, our review contributes to systematize multiple—sometimes entropic—interpretations of desertification processes into a more organized framework, giving value to methodological interplays and specific interpretations of the latent processes underlying land degradation.

Unraveling Causes and Consequences of International Retirement Migration to Coastal and Rural Areas in Mediterranean Europe

“…The complex motivations at the base of IRM require further clarification and permanent assessment, being relevant to the analysis of residential mobility at older ages in the Mediterranean region [109][110][111]. Displaying different impacts according with the specific local context, IRM stimulated, for instance, scattered urbanization along coastal districts in Spain, leading to intense urban sprawl and land degradation [41,96,112]. Conversely, in some Italian or French countryside locations, rural settlements have been progressively reused and permanently occupied by retirees coming from Northern Europe [21,55,69].…”

‘Old’ Territorial Disparities and ‘New’ Spatial Patterns: Unraveling the Latent Nexus between Sustainable Development and Desertification Risk in Italy

“…Italy has been selected as the case study because it is characteristic of different-often polarizedsocioeconomic and environmental contexts (Helldén and Tottrup 2008;Salvati and Zitti 2009;Briassoulis 2011;Colantoni et al 2015). The use of composite indexes allows for an objective assessment of the local contexts under (more or less) sustainable development paths and exposed to a (more or less) evident risk of desertification (Halbac-Cotoara-Zamfir et al 2020). Results can be used as an informative base to implement sustainability policies in developed and emerging countries characterized by important disparities in economic and social conditions.…”

Water and Sustainability. Towards a water transition in Iberian South-East

“…Enne et al 1998Enne et al , 2000. Se ha cuestionado por ello la utilidad de un concepto que abarca a un número de procesos de cambio ambiental tan diverso (Thomas y Middleton 1994;Martínez Fernández y Esteve Selma 2005), a la vez que se ha señalado la necesidad de enfoques sistémicos y específicos para cada contexto (Thomas y Middleton 1994;Martínez Fernández y Esteve Selma 1996;Dahlberg 2000;Warren 2002;Halbac-Cotoara et al 2020).…”