Wind erosion in European agricultural landscapes: More than physics

Abstract

Wind erosion from agricultural land is an underrated and understudied environmental challenge in Europe. Its societal and policy relevance will likely increase in the near future due to climate change and associated increases in the frequency, severity and patterns of atmospheric events such as droughts. We review the research on this issue and find it to be fragmented, siloed and dominated by natural sciences, leaving important research gaps. The most important gaps that circumscribe a research agenda for the future include specific effects of future climate change on wind erosion, the relevance of wind erosion for public health and ecosystem functioning, farmers' behaviour affecting erosion risk and feedback between land management and environmental change, and appropriate policy approaches to address wind erosion risks. Social science contributions are thus required to make wind erosion research relevant for addressing the related societally most pressing questions. We provide a social–environmental systems perspective to highlight the potential of inter‐ and transdisciplinary research into wind erosion in times of climate change and the increasingly recognized need to transform agriculture towards more sustainability and climate resilience. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

A belowground perspective on the nexus between biodiversity change, climate change, and human well‐being

“…Agricultural activities can contribute significantly to generating aeolian dust through the disturbance of soil surfaces and intensive land-use practices (Bartkowski et al, 2023;Chen et al, 2023).…”

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“…Wind erosion causes soil degradation and is one of the main threats (Bartosz et al, 2023) for European soils. This problem is constantly being investigated in virtually all regions of Europe: the semi-arid Mediterranean region (Teng et al, 2019;Bartosz et al, 2023) and the temperate continental climate region of southern European countries using the example of Romania's adjacent to the studied region area (Niacsu et al, 2019), and Ukraine (Tarariko et al, 2021).…”

“…Wind erosion causes soil degradation and is one of the main threats (Bartosz et al, 2023) for European soils. This problem is constantly being investigated in virtually all regions of Europe: the semi-arid Mediterranean region (Teng et al, 2019;Bartosz et al, 2023) and the temperate continental climate region of southern European countries using the example of Romania's adjacent to the studied region area (Niacsu et al, 2019), and Ukraine (Tarariko et al, 2021). The consequences of wind erosion are a decrease in soil fertility, which in turn negatively affects the yield of agricultural crops, and, as a result, leads to a decrease in the economic efficiency of agriculture (Abuzaid et al, 2023).…”

Spatiotemporal Variation in Wind Erosion in Tarim River Basin from 2010 to 2018

“…This is a common phenomenon, mainly occurring in dry sandy soil or any loose, dry, and fine-grained soil. Wind erosion causes a wide range of ecological and environmental problems, such as land desertification [1], crop yield reduction [2], sandstorms [3], and the deterioration of human settlements [4] by removing and depositing soil from one place to another. Given its detrimental impacts and extensive repercussions, soil wind erosion represents a critical scientific issue within arid and semi-arid regions.…”