Human activity accelerating the rapid desertification of the Mu Us Sandy Lands, North China

Over the past several thousand years, arid and semiarid China has experienced a series of asynchronous desertification events in its semiarid sandy and desert regions, but the precise identification of the driving forces of such events has remained elusive. In this paper we identify two rapid desertification events (RDEs) at ~4.6 ± 0.2 ka BP and ~3.3 ± 0.2 ka BP from the JJ Profile, located in the eastern Mu Us Sandy Lands. These RDEs appear to have occurred immediately following periods marked by persistently frequent and intense fires. We argue that such fire patterns, directly linked to an uncontrolled human use of vegetation as fuel, played a key role in accelerating RDEs by ensuring that the land surface was degraded beyond the threshold required for rapid desertification. This would suggest that the future use of a massive and sustained ecological program of vegetation rehabilitation should reduce the risk of destructive fire.