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 this migration process in the source and receptor countries, this
contribution will focus on a particular issue: the environmental outcomes of the S-N flow of people and the inverse N-S flow of capital as remittances.To this purpose a micro-approach will be adopted by
considering the situation in a set of oasis in Morocco and Tunisia, and in the coastal intensive agriculture
of Spain.

A conceptual background will be adopted, in which desertification is thought as a break of sustainability
in the human-renewable resources system, due to disturbances that were not incorporated in its previous
history. Such disturbances may be climatic, demographic, economical, technological, institutional, etc.
Their common effect is that produce an uncontrolled over-exploitation of the resources.
Desertification and Migrations, II International Symposium, 25-27 October 2006, Almeria, Spain