It is interesting to consider how various traditional peoples around the world are coping with the growth of deserts especially in Africa which has been particularly hit hard.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2009/sep/07/turkana-kenya-drought-climate-change
This has been especially hard in Kenya where years of successive droughts have badly affected nomadic pastoralists with parched land and the drying up of traditional water holes and reservoirs.
The UN predicts that desertification could displace up to 50 million people from their homes in the next few years and that climate change and increasing desertification could be the greatest environmental challenge faced by man.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6247802.stm#map
People displaced by desertification put new strains on natural resources and on other societies nearby and threaten international instability.
"There is a chain reaction. It leads to social turmoil," said Zafaar Adeel, head of the UN University's International Network on Water, Environment and Health.The largest area affected was probably sub-Saharan Africa, where people are moving to northern Africa or to Europe, while the second area is the former Soviet republics in central Asia.
The UN report suggests that new farming practices, such as encouraging forests in dryland areas, were simple measures that could remove more carbon from the atmosphere and also prevent the spread of deserts. "It says to dryland dwellers we need to provide alternative livelihoods - not the traditional cropping based on irrigation, cattle farming, etcetera - but rather introduce more innovative livelihoods which don't put pressure on the natural resources," Mr Adeel said. "Things like ecotourism or using solar energy to create other activities." Some countries like China have embarked on tree-planting programmes to stem the advance of deserts. But according to the author, in some cases the trees being planted needed large amounts of water, putting even more pressure on scarce resources.
So it would appear that there is no easy or immediate solution.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/murray-darling/toensing-photography
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/murray-darling/draper-text
The Murray Darling River Basin in Australia has been particularly hard hit and families are employing some unusual methods to cut their water consumption in half. Families are encouraged to shower together and even shower with feet in large buckets so that the water can then be collected and recycled to flush toilets or water the garden.
We may laugh but the reality is that Portugal has experienced a record number of dry years since 1970 and water availability is an increasingly important issue.
