Prospective Desertification Trends In The Negev - Implications For Urban And Regional Development

摘要

Most Mediterranean countries contain a diversity of land types, of various degrees of aridity and soil fertility. In the southern Mediterranean, coastal areas are usually less dry and more fertile than inland regions, many of which are semi-arid and arid deserts; the southern regions of several northern Mediterranean countries are drylands, e.g. Spain, Italy and Greece. In Israel, there is a north-south gradient of aridity: the north and centre of the country are dry-sub-humid, whereas the south is semi-arid, arid, and hyper-arid. With the surge of population increase, intensifying urbanisation in Israel out-competes agriculture and industry. As a result, agriculture and polluting industries are pushed from fertile land to the semi-arid northern Negev, or even to the arid and hyperarid, central and southern Negev, respectively. However, agriculture and heavy industries are nearly always the main causes of desertification: they cause land degradation due to soil erosion, soil and water salinisation, and loss of biodiversity. Population and urbanisation pressure is thus putting more drylands at risk of further desertification. These processes are bound to intensify in Israel, and probably also in many other Mediterranean countries. The first victim of desertification caused by agriculture is agriculture itself. As a result, dryland agriculture is often abandoned, leaving behind an ecosystem that ceases to provide environmental services, and is costly or even impossible to rehabilitate. Thus, by pushing agriculture from non-desert to desert, not only agriculture itself may be doomed, but also alternative uses of the desert, such as conservation of biodiversity, recreation, eco-tourism and tourism, are excluded. Thus, urbanisation trends in non-desert drylands and other lands, not only bring desertification to more arid drylands, but also deny a country's non-desert population the use of these drylands as a resource for recreation and for alternative income-generating livelihoods. Furthermore, due to a sustained accelerated population growth, urbanisation will eventually also reach the desert, but will then find there a further desertified, less hospitable environment than it would otherwise have done. In this paper, we propose an alternative scenario for sustainable development of a Mediterranean country having both desert and non-desert regions. Rather than concentrating now on further urbanizing the fertile and already heavy populated regions and as a result introducing much more agriculture and polluting industry into the desert, we propose either full or partial cessation of the urbanisation process in the fertile, heavy populated areas, and, instead of introducing agriculture into deserts, introduce urbanisation into desert regions. The present paper attempts to answer the following questions: 1. What are the main development alternatives available for the Negev? 2. How can desirable types of development in the Negev be encouraged? The paper starts with a brief overview of environmental conditions in the Negev. Then it outlines both current and prospective desertification trends in the region. Following this introduction, two alternative strategies of the Negev development - agricultural vs. urban development path - are introduced and discussed in some detail. However, the process of desert urbanisation requires special design and planning features that will make it viable, and these features will be elaborated in this paper.