Three times more land in drought than in Eighties, study finds

The space of land floor affected by drought has trebled because the Eighties, a brand new report into the consequences of local weather change has revealed.

Forty-eight per cent of the Earth’s land floor had not less than one month of utmost drought final yr, in keeping with evaluation by the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change – up from a mean of 15% through the Eighties.

Almost a 3rd of the world – 30% – skilled excessive drought for 3 months or longer in 2023. In the Eighties, the common was 5%.

The new study presents a number of the latest international knowledge on drought, marking simply how briskly it’s accelerating.

The threshold for excessive drought is reached after six months of very low rainfall or very excessive ranges of evaporation from crops and soil – or each.

It poses a right away danger to water and sanitation, meals safety and public well being, and might have an effect on power provides, transportation networks and the economic system.

The causes of particular person droughts are sophisticated, as a result of there are many various factors that have an effect on the provision of water, from pure climate occasions to the way in which people use land.

But local weather change is shifting international rainfall patterns, making some areas more susceptible to drought.

The improve in drought has been significantly extreme in South America, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa.

In South America’s Amazon, drought is threatening to alter climate patterns.

It kills timber which have a task to play in stimulating rainclouds to type, which disrupts delicately balanced rainfall cycles – making a suggestions loop resulting in additional drought.

Yet, similtaneously massive sections of the land mass have been drying out, excessive rainfall has additionally elevated.

In the previous 10 years, 61% of the world noticed a rise in excessive rainfall, compared with a baseline common from 1961-1990.

The hyperlink between droughts, floods and international warming is complicated. Hot climate will increase the evaporation of water from soil which makes durations when there is no such thing as a rain even drier.

But local weather change can also be altering rainfall patterns. As the oceans heat, more water evaporates into the air. The air is warming too, which implies it could possibly maintain more moisture. When that moisture strikes over land or converges right into a storm, it results in more intense rain.

The Lancet Countdown report discovered the well being impacts of local weather change had been reaching record-breaking ranges.

Drought uncovered 151 million more folks to meals insecurity final yr, in contrast with the Nineties, which has contributed to malnutrition. Heat-related deaths for over 65s additionally elevated by 167% in comparison with the Nineties.

Meanwhile, rising temperatures and more rain are inflicting a rise in mosquito-related viruses. Cases of dengue fever are at an all-time excessive and dengue, malaria and West Nile virus have unfold to locations they had been by no means discovered earlier than.

An improve in mud storms has left hundreds of thousands more folks uncovered to harmful air air pollution.

“The climate is changing fast,” says Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown.

“It is changing to conditions that we are not used to and that we did not design our systems to work around.”

For the series Life at 50 degrees, BBC World Service visited some of the hottest parts of the world, where demand for water was already high. We found that extreme drought and rainfall had further squeezed access to water.

Since 2020, an extreme and exceptional agricultural drought has gripped northeast Syria and parts of Iraq.

In the past few years, Hasakah, a city of one million people, has run out of clean water.

“Twenty years ago, water used to flow into the Khabor River but this river has been dried for many years because there is no rain,” says Osman Gaddo, the Head of Water Testing, Hasakah City Water Board. “People have no access to fresh water.”

When they can’t get water, people make their own wells by digging into the ground but the groundwater can be polluted, making people ill.

The drinking water in Hasakah comes from a system of wells 25 kilometres away, but these are also drying and the fuel needed to extract water is in short supply.

Clothes go unwashed and families can’t bathe their children properly, meaning skin diseases and diarrhoea are widespread.

“People are ready to kill their neighbour for water,” one resident tells the BBC. “People are going thirsty every day.”

In South Sudan, 77% of the country had at least one month of drought last year and half the country was in extreme drought for at least six months. At the same time, more than 700,000 people have been affected by flooding.

“Things are deteriorating,” says village elder, Nyakuma. “When we go in the water, we get sick. And the food we eat isn’t nutritious enough”.

Nyakuma has caught malaria twice in a matter of months.

Her family lost their entire cattle herd after flooding last year and now survive on government aid along with anything they can forage.

“Eating this is like eating mud,” says Sunday, Nyakuma’s husband, as he searches floodwater for the roots of waterlillies.

During a drought, rivers and lakes dry up and the soil gets scorched, meaning it hardens and loses plant cover. If heavy rain follows, water cannot soak into the ground and instead runs off, causing flash flooding.

“Plants can adapt to extreme drought, to an extent anyway, but flooding really disrupts their physiology,” adds Romanello. “It is really bad for food security and the agricultural sector.”

Unless we can reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and stop the global temperature from rising further, we can expect more drought and more intense rain. 2023 was the hottest year on record.

“At the moment, we are still in a position to just about adapt to the changes in the climate. But it is going to get to a point where we will reach the limit of our capacity. Then we will see a lot of unavoidable impacts,” says Romanello.

“The increased we enable the worldwide temperature to go, the more serious issues are going to be”.