Global patterns and climate sensitivity of water- and wind-driven soil erosion risk

Soil erosion by water and wind is a major land degradation process with wide-ranging impacts on food production, ecosystem functioning, and socioeconomic systems (Shokri et al., 2025). Intensified precipitation extremes and increasing aridity could influence the relative dominance of water- and wind-driven erosion in complex and spatially heterogeneous ways. However, a systematic understanding of where and how these two erosion mechanisms will respond to future climate variability at the global scale remains largely lacking. Current global assessments predominantly rely on empirical models. However, these approaches are highly parameterized, require extensive calibration, and are often difficult to apply consistently under changing climate conditions. Here, we aim to present a new framework to quantify potential soil erosion risk, in terms of the probability of erosion occurrence, rather than absolute soil loss. The study will use km-scale global simulations from ICON (~10 km) (Hohenegger et al., 2023), together with satellite and global soil datasets, to assess potential water and wind erosion risk under present and future climate conditions. The resulting high-resolution maps provide insight into present-day erosion hot spots, projected changes in erosion likelihood under different scenarios, and contrasting responses of water- and wind-driven erosion systems to variations in precipitation regimes, wind, and land surface conditions. This establishes an integrated and climate-informed basis (Shokri et al., 2023) for identifying priority regions for soil conservation and land management.

References:

Hohenegger, C., Korn, P., Linardakis, L., Redler, R., Schnur, R., Adamidis, P., et al. (2023). ICON‐Sapphire: Simulating the components of the Earth system and their interactions at kilometer and subkilometer scales. Geoscientific Model Development, 16(2), 779–811. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-779-2023

Shokri, N., Robinson, D.A., Afshar, M., Alewell, C., Aminzadeh, M., Arthur, M., Broothaerts, N., Campbell, G.A., Eklund, L., Gupta, S., Harper, R., Hassani, A., Hohenegger, C., Keller, T., Kiener, M., Lebron, I., Madani, K., Marwala, T., Matthews, F., Moldrup, P., Nemes, A., Panagos, P., Prăvălie, R., Rillig, M.C., Saggau, P., Shokri-Kuehni, S.M.S., Smith, P., Thomas, A., Wollesen de Jonge, L., Or, O. (2025). Rethinking Global Soil Degradation: Drivers, Impacts, and Solutions, Rev. Geophys. 63, e2025RG000883, https://doi.org/10.1029/2025RG000883

Shokri, N., Stevens, B., Madani, K., Grabe, J., Schlüter, M., Smirnova, I. (2023). Climate Informed Engineering: An essential pillar of Industry 4.0 transformation, ACS Eng. Au, 3, 1, 3–6, https://doi.org/10.1021/acsengineeringau.2c00037