Andrew Warren (born 27 October 1937 in Kalimpong, North Bengal, India) is a British physical geographer. He is Emeritus Professor of Geography at University College London, UK.
Warren's contributions are to the understanding of desert sand dunes, desertification in arid lands, and soil erosion by wind. In addition he has contributed to conservation science, editing several books on conservation issues and supervising several PhD students.
His contribution to the desertification debate has been to assert the 'social' and 'contextual' nature of desertification processes, as well as the inadequacies of monitoring techniques and broad statements about desertification in drylands up until the 1990s.[1] This has proven controversial, but has helped shift the debate on desertification to one that recognizes dryland peoples as positive agents of change rather than destroyers of fragile ecosystems.[2]
He studied soil erosion in several parts of Africa and the Middle East, but particularly as part of a larger project on livelihoods and environmental change in South West Niger with Adrian Chappell (CSIRO) and Simon Batterbury (Lancaster University/University of Melbourne).[3]Caesium-137 techniques were used to link patterns of soil flux to changes in the livelihoods of Sahelian farming households over 30 years, showing how households with labour shortages had greater net erosion on their fields but sometimes more diversified sources of income. In Europe the EU-funded WHEELS[4] project helped to understand the causation of wind erosion on light agricultural soils.
In the mid-2000s Warren participated in an expedition to the Bodélé Depression, northern Chad, dubbed the "dustiest place on Earth". The team established that the region contributes substantially to global atmospheric dust due to its diatomite and mega-barchan dunes.[5] The team also argued that dust, displaced into the upper atmosphere and widely dispersed, is a major contributor to terrestrial and oceanic nutrient budgets.[6]
Awards
1961–1964 Hunting Group Scholarship, University of Cambridge.
Warren, A. and Khogali, M. 1992. Desertification and drought in the Sudano-Sahelian region 1985–1991. United Nations Sudano-Sahelian Office (UNSO), New York, 102 pp.
Cooke, R.U., Warren, A. and Goudie, A.S. 1992. Desert geomorphology. UCL Press, London, 512 pp.
Goldsmith, F.B. and Warren, A., Eds. 1993. Conservation in progress. Wiley, Chichester, 384 pp.
Batterbury, S.P.J & A.Warren. (Eds.) 2001. The African Sahel 25 years after the Great Drought. Special Issue of Global Environmental Change. 11 (1): 1–96. (8 papers).
Warren, A. 2013. Dunes: dynamics, morphology, history. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN978-1-4443-3969-7
Livingstone, I. and Warren, A. (eds.). 2019. Aeolian geomorphology: a new introduction. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester.
Articles
Warren, A. 1995. Changing understandings of African pastoralism and environmental paradigms. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 20 (2), 193–203.
Warren, A., Sud, Y.C. and Rozanov, B. 1996. The future of deserts. Journal of Arid Environments, 32, 75–89.
Wiggs, G.F.S., Livingstone, I. and Warren, A. 1996. The role of streamline curvature in sand dune dynamics: evidence from field and wind-tunnel measurements. Geomorphology, 17, 29–46.
Chappell, A., Warren, A. Oliver, M.A. and Charlton, M. 1998. The utility of 137Cs for measuring soil redistribution rates in south-west Niger. Geoderma, 81 (3–4), 313–338.
Warren, A. and Allison, D. 1998. The palaeoenvironmental significance of dune-size hierarchies. Paleogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 137 (3–4), 289–303.
Chappell, A., Valentin, C., Warren, A. and d'Herbes, J-M. 1999. Testing the validity of upslope migration in banded vegetation from south-west Niger. Catena, 37: 217–229.
Momiji H, Warren A. 2000. Relations of sand trapping efficiency and migration speed of transverse dunes to wind velocity. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 25 (10): 1069–1084.
Warren, A. 2002. Land Degradation is contextual. Land Degradation and Development. 13 (6): 449–459
Warren A, Chappell A, Todd MC, Bristow C, Drake N, Engelstaedter S, Martins V, M'bainayel S, Washington R. 2007. Dust-raising in the dustiest place on earth. Geomorphology 92(1–2):
↑ "Report"(PDF). www.geog.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 17 June 2021.
↑ Warren A, Chappell A, Todd MC, Bristow C, Drake N, Engelstaedter S, Martins V, M'bainayel S, Washington R. 2007. Dust-raising in the dustiest place on earth. Geomorphology 92(1–2):
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