Soil Erosion by Water and Climate Change, How Can Reaching the Sustainability in European Mediterranean Basin

Abstract

Water erosion, and the consequent soil loss, represents a cost to agriculture as it means loss of productive land, nutrients and organic matter as well as environmental degradation of water resources downstream. This cycle of unsustainability will lead, to a physical desertification of places accompanied by a human desertification. It is essential to understanding the process, the influence of each factor that it depends, for the adoption of more effective actions for its prevention. The randomness of the Mediterranean climate can determine years with higher volumes of precipitation that correspond to more erosive events, and driest years with the occurrence of fewer erosive events, but with expanded erosive potential in some of them. This climatic pattern will be aggravated in climate change scenario, which correspond the forecast less annual rainfall volume, but concentrated in extreme events. The runoff will be more or less powered, depending on how manifest other factors that influence the erosive process, namely, vegetation, soil, topography, and agricultural practices of farmers.