ABSTRACT
In 1949, Auguste Aubréville, a French forester, noticed that the Sahara Desert was expanding into surrounding savannahs and coined the term desertification to describe the process. Not until the 1970s did the term come to wide notice when a ruinous drought in the Sahel region of Africa led to the United Nations Conference on Desertification (UNCOD) in 1977, which showed that the process was probably occurring in all the world’s drylands. The topic has since generated a huge literature, a legion of definitions, a collection of world maps, and much controversy.
