ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: This paper reviews the role of integrated environmental modelling in the better understanding of land degradation and desertification specifically for improved policy formulation to prevent, mitigate or adapt to its consequences. Integrated environmental modelling attempts to couple the socio-economic drivers of desertification with the biophysical desertification processes and their outcomes. This is best achieved as a bi-directional feedback in which (a) the socioeconomic drivers force the biophysical desertification processes (alongside external biophysical drivers such as aridification), (b) the desertification processes lead to some development of land or environmental condition which can be either stasis, aggradation or degradation and (c) the socio-economic system responds to those changes which then further changes the socio-economic drivers, and so on in a feedback loop.
