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Alarming signals are emerging throughout the world about the state of our environment and the increasing pressures exerted on it.For example, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) showed that ecosystems are under increasing stress and some of them are socompromised that they cannot provide adequate levels of services for human …

Since the early nineties in the last century, scholars are warning about the dramatic increase of the demographic and economic gradients from northern African to southern European countries and their consequences to the migration rates. Fifteen years after those predictions are becoming confirmed. Rather than looking at the whole intricacies of…

Twelve years after Almeria I (1994) we still lack systematic empirical knowledge on the links between desertification and migration. The International Year to Combat Desertification may create cooperative structures for interdisciplinary research involving both natural and social scientists and fostering North-South research partnerships.

In the past three decades the rate of desertification has increased dramatically in the forty percent of land surface classified as arid or semi-arid, dealing particularly harsh blows to the besieged inhabitants of developing nations. During the present decade, the amount of land degraded by desertification will be double that of the past two decades. This translates into the staggering loss of…