Two wrongs don't make a right: A multi-step decomposition of latent dimensions of sustainable development and desertification risk in Italy

Desertification risk affects Mediterranean ecosystems as a result of the mutual interplay between natural and human factors. The peculiar socioeconomic profile of vulnerable areas (mainly based on rural poverty, job shortage and the consequent unemployment, subsidence agriculture and ecological fragility of land) suggests that desertification risk may negatively impact the sustainable development of local communities, leading to an irreversible depletion of soil resources. However, although sustainable development and desertification risk remain two hegemonic concepts in both ecological and economic disciplines, their intimate relationship has been occasionally investigated. The present study contributes to fill this knowledge gap delineating a multi-step procedure that analyses, at the municipal scale, the multivariate relationship among 160 indicators of sustainable development and desertification risk in Italy. Based on a Principal Component Analysis (PCA), the procedure performed a spectral decomposition of 18 dimensions of sustainable development (populated with 156 indicators) into 53 latent components taken as predictors of four indicators of desertification risk in a partial least square regression. Results document three sequential ‘early desertification spirals', the first one referring to agricultural intensification (1960–1990), the second one dependent on urbanization-driven human pressure (1990–2000), and the third one reflecting wealth accumulation and societal changes toward less sustainable lifestyles and consumption patterns. This latent evolution may confirm the increasing importance of ‘immaterial' forces such as globalization, societal transformations, and other ‘soft' factors of change, when lowering environmental quality, in spite of more traditional drivers of ecosystem degradation, such as agricultural intensification and economic growth, typical of a capitalistic ‘material' world.