Sustainable Development, Territorial Disparities in Land Resources, and Soil Degradation: A Multi-Temporal Approach

The present study investigates territorial disparities in selected socioeconomic forces and environmental factors underlying soil degradation that may lead to early desertification processes in a dry Mediterranean region exposed to increasing human pressure. To verify if spatial disparities in land resources have increased over time, a standard approach based on the Environmentally Sensitive Area Index (ESAI) was adopted to evaluate sixty years of territorial transformations in Latium, Central Italy, a region prone to intense processes of land resource depletion. The ESAI provides a standard, holistic assessment of soil degradation based on the estimation of four different ‘resource qualities’ (climate, soil, vegetation, and land use) and their change over sufficiently long time windows; in this study, the procedure was run at three reference years (1960, 1990, and 2020). The observed divergence in soil degradation levels between coastal and inland districts arose during the study period, with a consequent reduction in the local-scale variability of the ESAI. Such differential processes observed along the elevation gradient in Central Italy are likely due to anthropogenic factors affecting land use and leveraging crop intensification in flat districts and farmland abandonment in steep areas. New findings to be achieved in the context of human impacts on land resource depletion are regarded as an original contribution to the study of early desertification processes in advanced economies.