Area of land degradation in arid regions from 2000 to 2023

The majority of recent land uses in drylands have been grasslands (32.2% of all drylands) and dryland forests (typical forest and sparse forest including shrub and savanna, 23%). If these lands are appropriately managed, they have the potential to sequester 0.84 Gt of soil organic carbon per year. However, climate change associated with global warming has led to an increase in temperature and irregular rainfall, which can both exacerbate the damage of droughts and desertification, and there is an urgent need to develop sustainable land management in arid regions. This study examined the interannual changes in the degraded land area in arid regions derived from a threshold value of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and the satellite-based aridity index (SbAI) from 2000 to 2023. Here, degraded land includes existing deserts and land having both permanent and temporal aeolian desertified areas. The total area of degraded lands was found to have exhibited a decreasing trend since 2000, but has gradually increased since about 2015. A method based on climo-vegetation regions is presented that uses NDVI and SbAI along with the climatological land use and classification of arid regions to understand current vegetation conditions as well as areas that deviated from their climatic potential.