Abstract
Our presentation represents a brief overview of recent climatic and environmental changes over the Dry Lands of Northern Eurasia. The Dry Land Belt (DLB) in Northern Eurasia is the largest contiguous dryland on Earth. During the last century, changes here have included land use change (e.g., rapid virgin land development in the mid of the 1950s; cf. Figure 1), resource extraction, rapid institutional shifts (e.g., collapse of the Soviet Union), climatic changes, and natural disturbances. These factors intertwine, overlap, sometimes mitigate but sometimes feedback upon each other to exacerbate their synergistic and cumulative effects. Thus, it is important to document properly each of these external and internal factors and to characterize structural relationships among them in order to develop better approaches to alleviating negative consequences of these regional environmental changes. This paper addresses the climatic changes observed over the DLB in recent decades and outlines possible links of these changes (both impacts and feedbacks) with other external and internal factors of contemporary regional environmental change and human activities within the DLB.