Dry Land Belt of Northern Eurasia: Contemporary Environmental Changes

The Dry Land Belt (DLB) of Northern Eurasia is the largest contiguous dryland on Earth. Changes in DLB during the last century have included resource extraction (e.g., coal, oil, gas, and mineral ores), rapid land cover and land use change (e.g., expansion of irrigated croplands and cities), institutional shifts (e.g., collapse of the Soviet Union, China’s entry to the World Trade Organization), global and regional climatic changes, and natural disturbances (e.g., wildfire, drought, dust). These factors intertwine, overlap, and sometimes mitigate but sometimes feedback to each other exacerbating their synergistic and cumulative effects. Thus, it is important to document properly the key external and internal factors and to characterize structural relationships among them to study better approaches to alleviating negative consequences of these regional environmental changes. This chapter addresses key climatic changes observed over the DLB in recent decades and it outlines possible linkages of these changes with other external and internal factors of the contemporary regional environmental change and human activities within the DLB.