# Sand and Dust Storms: Impact Mitigation
## 5 Policy Measures for SDS Impact Mitigation
### Policy Lessons, Failures and Inadvertent Impacts  
Wind erosion from agricultural land in the North American Great Plains peaked in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, when a severe drought and poor land management resulted in significant soil losses and widespread economic hardship (2017). One significant result of the catastrophic socio-ecological effects of the Dust Bowl was much greater participation of government in soil conservation and land management issues. [PERSON] et al. (2017) have reviewed the initiatives. A national Soil Conservation Service (SCS), created in the USA in 1935, identified areas in need of remediation using aerial photography surveys and detailed soil maps. The SCS acquired unoccupied and abandoned lands, significant dust storm sources, and used them for demonstration projects on terracing and contour plowing. Other government agencies provided subsidies to encourage improved plowing methods and funded the planting of shelterblets on many private lands. A resettlement program was introduced to encourage owners of small farms in drier parts of the Great Plains to relocate. Similar types of interventions, by both national and provincial government, occurred in Canada. Farmland was purchased to convert to grazing, subsidies offered to families willing to abandon farms in drought-stricken areas, and farmers encouraged to establish shelterblets and adopt soil conservation measures ([PERSON], 2017). The effectiveness of government interventions in land management on the North American Great Plains has been debated. In the USA, some evidence indicates that soil conservation efforts initiated in the 1930s helped reduce the scale of wind erosion when drought returned to the Great Plains in the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s ([PERSON], 2017). Certainly many of the soil conservation practices encouraged by government agencies are still appropriate for reducing dust storm activity ([PERSON], 2017). Indeed, much of the research into soil conservation and land management on the Great Plains has influenced practices in many other parts of the world ([PERSON], 2017). However, wind erosion continues on the US Great Plainsduring times of drought and the potential for land management improvements to be undermined by other policies was highlighted by [PERSON] et al. (2016) who attributed part of the blame for a severe dust storm in 1977 to new government incentives to cultivate marginal land. Recent work by [PERSON] et al. (2017) indicates that fine airborne dust loads (PM\({}_{2.5}\)) in central and northern parts of the US Great Plains have increased over the period 2000-2014. Wind erosion also continues to be an issue during recurrent drought periods in the Canadian Prairie Provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba but [PERSON] et al. (2017) detected a region-wide threshold change in dustiness after 1990 that they attribute to changes in farming practices, at least in part a result of numerous initiatives--both government and private non-profit--promoting soil conservation techniques in the 1980s, as detailed in Table 5.  
Technical approaches to SLM in general and soil conservation in particular are not always successful for a variety of reasons. In many cases, farmers simply do not adopt agricultural innovations. Although there are numerous possible explanations--including biophysical characteristics of the farm, farmer household characteristics, and land tenure issues--there appear to be few if any universal variables that regularly explain this phenomenon ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2016). As a result, a targeted policy approach is frequently advocated in which policy mechanisms such as extension services or grants are geared to the local characteristics of an area or indeed to individual farmers and their farm operations ([PERSON] and [PERSON], 2016). The importance of engaging farmers as active players in conservation efforts rather than passive adopters of technologies is highlighted in projects that focus on a society's social capital as an effective way of achieving greater impacts.