Order of European Inventors and Innovators
In its 2018 special report on combating desertification in the European Union, the European Court of Auditors states that about 30% of Romania’s territory has arid or semi-arid conditions — in Dobrogea, in Moldavia, in the south of the Romanian Plain and in the Western Plain.
It is not a Romanian problem alone. Cyprus has 99% of its territory vulnerable, Spain 74%, Portugal more than half of its mainland. But the way it is distributed here — across the country’s best agricultural land — makes it cost more than elsewhere.
How fast it moves
The figure that ought to be quoted more often is not the one about stock, but the one about speed. Between 2008 and 2017, the European area with high or very high sensitivity to desertification grew by 177,000 km² — Greece and Slovakia combined. Areas of very high sensitivity almost tripled, from 10,000 to 28,000 km².
Nine years. That is a rate which leaves no room for a discussion about whether it is time to act.
What the European audit found
The auditors concluded that the risk of desertification in the EU was not being addressed effectively and efficiently. The Commission did not have a clear picture of the phenomenon, the measures taken lacked coherence, there was no agreed assessment methodology and no dedicated strategy.
It is worth reading carefully what that means: the problem was neither unknown nor short of money. It was short of a structure that would treat it as one problem, measurable and someone’s responsibility.
The part that is solved technically
Desertification is not one problem but a bundle of smaller ones, many of them engineering problems:
The water that does not stay. Retaining water in the soil at plot level, with cheap solutions — not national irrigation systems, but what a thirty-hectare farm can buy.
The soil that loses its organic matter. Locally produced soil improvers, including from the residues discussed in the article on biomass. The two problems share a raw material.
The sand that moves. Shelterbelts are an old and proven solution; what is missing is not the idea but the right species for today’s conditions and a way of planting them quickly and cheaply.
Measurement. Without plot-level data there is no knowing what works. Cheap sensors for soil moisture and composition are a field where a good solution has an immediate market.
Why this is a subject for inventors, not only for governments
Because the problems above share one trait: they are solved at small scale, repeatedly, across thousands of plots. They do not need a national programme in order to begin; they need equipment and methods a farmer can buy and use alone.
That, incidentally, is the practical definition of an applied invention: a solution cheap and simple enough that its adoption does not depend on a political decision.
Source: European Court of Auditors, Special Report 33/2018, “Combating desertification in the EU: a growing threat in need of more action”.