What are the economic uses of deserts?

Answer 1

What can you use a desert for? Well, weapons testing, hazardous chemical storage, air craft testing/flying/training, testing out Mars rovers because of the similarity of terrain, mining copper and building ridiculously overpriced tract (identical pink stucco ones at that) for the elderly and middle class--maybe even throw in a golf course or two.

OR, you can use all that dry Earth to build Las Vegas and make money hand over fist through slot machines, etc.

Answer 2

The fact that they're deserts means by definition there are not many uses for them. Some might say oil, but that's just because a lot of oil happens to be under some deserts. The fact that we can't really develop them allows us to use them for things like nuclear weapons tests, or breaking the land speed record. If you count hurricanes as economic negatives, the Sahara desert's dust often blows into the Atlantic and inhibits the formation of hurricanes. As with so many things, while deserts are not particularly useful, we've adapted to the ones we have. I have a hard time believing that deserts are economically useful at all...if we had the choice, I bet we would irrigate all the deserts of the world.

Answer 3

Most of know the names of the big deserts in the world. As far as developing them, would be futile, because of the lack of water which is the prime ingredient for development and inhabiting. So what can they be used for? Where each desert meets a civilized region, solar energy can be harnessed with the use of solar panels, the heat of the desert can be utilized with the installation of heat collectors that can heat the civilized region and if the desert has windy conditions most of the time, windmills can be installed to harness the wind for electricity.

Answer 4

Seems they have put a lot of golf courses in desert areas...foolish use of water if you ask me....Besides that I feel that deserts are valuable as a home for the rare and wonderful wildlife that have adapted to live there. Economics is a purely human construct...meaning , if we can't make money off it, then it must be worthless. I really disagree with that idea.

Answer 5

Excellent sites for solar energy installations because the sky is generally cloudless.

Solar One, which isn't for electricity generation anymore, was built in California in the 80s to take advantage of the intense sunlight. One website says we could handle the whole country's electrical needs with a large solar energy array in Nevada. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend that, but it gives us some idea of the potential for energy from desert land.

Another web site is loaded with evidence of economic benefit from the deserts of California. In fact it states that the desert in just four California counties generates $1.4 billion a year and supports nearly 3700 jobs. Just a few benefits they mention are: natural laboratory for scientific research, space for recreation, repository for biodiversity (with potential for development of new products, pharmaceuticals, ....) See article for more details: http://www.wilderness.org/Library/Documents/upload/EconBenefitsOfCaliforniaDesertWildAlerts2004.pdf