Processes of soil damage and treats in Croatia

A few years ago, the world entered the third millennium with a number of serious and very concerning problems, which are more and more expressed every day. The gravest problems are undernourishment and environmental pollution. Current world population is about 6.8 billion, with a population growth of about 80 million people per year. At the same time, a trend of constant and rapid agricultural land reduction, due to different types of damage (soil losses by permanent land reallocation being especially dramatic), has been present over the last decades in the whole world, and so also in Croatia. Annual loss of agricultural land in the world due to reallocation has been estimated at 5-6 million ha (Urushadze, 2002). Agricultural land loss in Croatia amounted to about 6700 ha/year in the period 1953-1999 (Vidacek, 2001). It is important to emphasize that this process is expressly negative today and is mostly out of control. In this context, besides other negative effects of these losses, the issue arises of producing sufficient quantities of food in the future. On the other side, we are witnesses of different forms of soil degradation - acidification, dehumification, contamination, erosion and desertification associated with climate changes. Of course that, as soil buffering capacities are restricted, these degradation changes are manifested in yield reduction. Given that the soil is a primary natural resource for food production, it is necessary to manage it in a sustainable way and protect it from all forms of damage, in a way that its land area and quality (namely fertility) is not reduced. The first part of this chapter offers a short display of land resources in Croatia, as well as of major soil damaging processes and threats. In the end, the risk of soil erosion by water is displayed, since soil erosion is the most important soil damaging process in Croatia (Husnjak, 2002).