Urban Desertification and its Solution

This will be the first third of a paper i made about urban desertification. I'm sorry to Tunza Eco-Generation and all the other ambassadors for not posting my articles for the last three months. Although this might seem like an excuse, I had to take the SAT, ACT, TOEFL, and other tests (that i did not want to take either :P ) and I totally forgot to send an excuse e-mail. 

Again, I am really sorry for the whole inconvenience. 

Introduction

Recently, the world has been in war with various environmental problems. Among those, desertification was one of the main opponents. Thus, many NGO?s and policies were made to prevent and ameliorate the current status. However, although desertification is widely known, urban desertification is very mystic even to the very active environmental activist. In this paper, in order to alert the people about this peculiar phenomenon, basic information about urban desertification will be listed and will also broach into the topic of several solutions to this phenomenon.

Main

         Urban desertification can be seen as desertification in a city due to various reasons such as concrete, asphalt, and other impermeable substances that cover the ground preventing plants from growing, sewers that do not allow minerals to be provided to the soil, and etc. These cause the amount of evaporation to increase while decreasing the amount of absorption.

         Impermeable substances are a crucial problem in preventing urban desertification. Like the desertification we are familiar with, we need plants and soil in order to save the water inside the Earth. However, like desertification, a decrease of soil or plants exposed to water will increase the amount water that will flow through the sewers. This will decrease the humidity of the city making a very arid city. These eventually cause an overall evaporation of water compared to the amount of absorption lowering the level of underground water, finally causing what we call urban desertification.

         Seoul is one example of this case. In 2011, 48% of the area was covered with apartments, buildings, concrete roads, and other barriers. Although the amount of precipitationincreased, 23% of the rainwater absorbed decreased and the amount of water released into the air by the soil decreased from 42% to 25%.

         Another reason is relentless underground development, especially underwater development. Developing underground area is different with over-ground because by doing this, it disconnects the outside and the underground. Thus, it blocks the underground water resources that many plants and trees use as ?food? drying them to death.

         Back to Seoul, approximately 2,354,000 m²,10,000,000m² if the area of subways is included, are blocking the flow of underground water resources. Especially in regions where metros are built less than 10m below the surface, they block every access to underwater resources and pump the water from rivers. Therefore, this urban development also accelerates urban desertification.