Publisher's Synopsis
Population growth, industrialization, environmental mismanagement and consequent land degradation have led to droughts, poverty and famine of such magnitude that the need for space, food and natural resources has become the most critical issue in global development. Nowhere is crisis more apparent than in arid lands. In this third of the world, population has more than doubled in two decades and poverty and human suffering are endemic. Water resources provide the key to economic and environmental development. Arid lands are essentially a diverse and disparate group of regions with a variety of economic and environmental problems, the common factor being the constraints imposed by the lack of moisture at certain times. The danger of treating the arid regions as a single geographical region is that they are then perceived as experiencing similar problems with similar causes requiring similar solutions. This book aims to dispel some of the myths that surround the water resource problems of arid lands and the notion that there are simple "once and for all" solutions. Given that the arid land environment is highly variable, the key to success is flexibility.;This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics in physical geography, environmental science and development studies, as well as to those actively engaged in the development of arid land water resources.
