Causes of land degradation:
- Deforestation: Forests play an important role in maintaining fertility of soil by shedding their leaves which contain many nutrients. Forests are also helpful in binding up of soil particles with the help of roots of vegetation. Therefore, cutting о forests will affect the soil adversely.
- Excessive Use of Fertilizers and Pesticides: Fertilizers are indispensable for increasing food production but their excessive use has occasioned much concern as a possible environmental threat. Excessive use of fertilizers is causing an imbalance in the quantity of certain nutrients in the soil. This imbalance adversely affects the vegetation.
- Overgrazing: Increase in livestock population results in overexploitation of pastures. Due to this, grass and other types of vegetation are unable to survive and grow in the area, and lack of vegetation cover leads to soil erosion. Millions of people in Africa and Asia raise animals on pastures and rangelands that have low carrying capacity because of poor quality or unreliable rainfall Pastoralists and their rangelands are threatened by overgrazing.
- Mineral processing like grinding of limestone for cement industry and calcite and soapstone for ceremic industry generate huge quantities of dust in the atmosphere. It stops the infiltration of water in the soil.
- Industrial effluents as wastes have become a major source of land and water pollution in many parts of the country.
Ways to check land degradation:
- Afforestation and proper management of grazing can help to check land degradation.
- Planting of shelter belts help in checking the sand causing land degradation near the deserts.
- Overgrazing can be checked and avoided.
- Stabilisation of sand dunes by growing thorny bushes can also check land degradation.
- Proper management of waste land can be taken up.
- Control on mining activities, so that mining does not affect the land and by refilling the scars.
- Proper discharge and disposal of industrial effluents and wastes after treatment can reduce land and water degradation in industrial areas.
