The climate assessment shows that the desert climates have spread north in parts of Central Asia.
The study found that temperatures have increased across all of Central Asia over the past 35 years. The retreat of some major glaciers may have been accelerated by the warmer and wetter mountain regions.
Jeffrey Dukes is an Ecologist at the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institute for Science. He says the findings are a good first step.
More than half of Central Asia has no precipitation. With little water available for plants and other organisms, much of the region is vulnerable to rising temperatures, which boost water evaporation in the soil, and heighten the risk of the region going into a dry spell. According to the study co-author, previous climate- change research has reported average changes in temperatures and rainfall for large parts of Central Asia, but that didn't provide much information for residents. Hu says that we need to know the details of climate change.
Central Asia was divided into 11 climate types using air temperature and precipitation data from 1960 to 2020.
Since the late 1980s, the area that was classified as having a desert climate has expanded eastwards, and has spread north as far as 100 kilometres. This expansion has had a domino effect on adjacent climate zones, which have become more dry. Between 1990 and 2020 the average temperature was at least 5 C higher than it was between 1960 and 1979 in some areas.
Dukes says that plant communities will become dominated by species that are adapted to hotter and dry conditions. He says that it will have consequences for the animals that depend on the grassland. The productivity of the land will be reduced until it becomes dead soil in some parts of the country.
There is a different situation in the mountains. There has been an increase in the amount of precipitation that falls as rain rather than snow in the area. Hu says that the melting of ice at high altitudes might explain why the glaciers in this range are getting smaller.
With a reduction in snowfall, glaciers in Central Asia will not replenish lost ice, meaning that less meltwater will flow to people and crops in the future.
Mickey Glantz is a climate scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dust storms and heatwaves are indicators that can be used to conclude that deserts are expanding.
Desertification is caused by human activities such as mining and agriculture. Governments in Central Asia should focus on sustainable farming. The rest of the world should pay attention to the changing climate and try to be more adapted to it.
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The article was first published in June of 2022,
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