Morocco - For the last six years, Herrah and her family have gone against tradition by remaining in the Erg Chigaga region of the Western Sahara Desert. Despite it being one of the most untouched parts of the Sahara—a place that is vast and wild, a place where nature still rules—climate change is causing a life-altering problem for nomadic people like Herrah.

The region has long been a place where nomadic Berber culture, which is rooted in individuals being able to exist off the land, can thrive. It is unusual for Berber nomads to stay sedentary for long, but since 2014 Herrah, her husband and children have been constrained to the same region with little more than a hut, two tents, some camels and a new motorcycle to their name, all due to changing weather patterns related to the climate crisis.

“[We’ve] stayed here now because it’s very dry,” Herrah said in Berber, using a translator to speak with the Chronicle. “[We] cannot move to other places. Every place is the same.” While arid conditions in the desert are characteristic, climate reports have raised concern over an accelerated rate of desertification—the process by which fertile land becomes desert—in the Sahara. But desertification is not just happening in the traditional, human-made sense, where, for example, farmers allow the land to be over-grazed. Instead, the climate crisis is causing deserts to expand, depleting natural resources such as food and water, which is adversely affecting communities like the Berber nomads by making more areas uninhabitable.

A study published in 2018 by researchers from the University of Maryland linked the exponential rate of desertification to “the footprints of climate change.”

The overall shift in the climatic conditions of the Northwestern Sahara Desert has disrupted Herrah and her family’s way of life.