As bad as the drought in California and the West has been, as bad as the depletion of water resources in our country has been, drought conditions in many parts of the world are far worse from the standpoint of human health and well being. In Syria drought was one of the major causes of the current conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands and torn apart the lives of millions of people.
Some social scientists, policy makers and others have previously suggested that the drought played a role in the Syrian unrest, and the researchers addressed this as well, saying the drought “had a catalytic effect.” They cited studies that showed that the extreme dryness, combined with other factors, including misguided agricultural and water-use policies of the Syrian government, caused crop failures that led to the migration of as many as 1.5 million people from rural to urban areas. This in turn added to social stresses that eventually resulted in the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in March 2011.
What began as civil war has since escalated into a multifaceted conflict, with at least 200,000 deaths. The United Nations estimates that half of the country’s 22 million people have been affected, with more than six million having been internally displaced.
Severe drought in Tanzania is destroying that nation’s ecological diversity, and now also threatens to destroy the economic live blood of the country, its farmers. Why? Because their farming culture depends on irrigation, and now with water levels at unprecedented lows, the government is having to choose between hydroelectric power and irrigation fed agriculture.
Faced with drought that has cut hydropower production in the face of growing power demand, the Tanzanian government is planning to declare the water supplies of the Mtera and Kidatu hydropower facilities in the south of the country protected sites.
The controversial move would ban any economic activity – including irrigation-fed farming – from taking place near reservoirs or other listed water resources. It is an attempt to ward off competition for water that officials say is affecting power generation.
But farmers say the move would devastate farming, herding, fishing and other ways of making a living in the area.
Take a good look at what drought looks like in Tanzania:
Drought contributes the food crisis in Sudan, which, as we saw in Texas, have led to severe flooding when the rains do come. And yes, this is connected to changes in our world’s climate.
The rainy season affected over 313,000 people in 44 of South Sudan’s 79 counties compared to 80,000 people who were affected by seasonal floods just two years earlier, the 2013 data suggest. Jonglei State was the worst hit, with flooding displacing hundreds of thousands of people, destroying crops, houses and basic infrastructure, including roads.
Droughts and floods damage farm yields and the national harvest, reducing food availability, and agricultural income from crop sales. Poor harvests threaten food security, especially for the many families who depend on agriculture for their food and income. Households and economies that are more diversified are less vulnerable to droughts and floods.
There is mounting evidence of long-term climate change in several parts of South Sudan. This is witnessed by very regular severe flooding in the states of Jonglei, Unity and Upper Nile. There is an urgent need for improved climate analysis, disaster prediction and risk reduction for South Sudan and, in particular for the greater Upper Nile region.
The Indian subcontinent is another region facing severe drought this year, and with it the recent devastation killer heat waves. India’s drought is leading to an increase in suicide among traditional farmers, as burdened by debt and another failed crop many seek death as their only escape from an uncertain and increasingly hostile environment. The last time severe drought struck India was in 2009, also the year of the last major El Nino climate pattern. Guess what is occurring this year? That’s right, the strongest El Nino since 1997. An El Nino expected to intensify in the fall and winter. Needless to say increasing frequency and strength of El Nino events have been linked to climate change by scientists, including those who work for NOAA.
And then there is Brazil.
In São Paulo, Brazil, which is suffering its worst drought in almost a century, Maria de Fátima dos Santos has lived for days at a time with no water, relying on what she had carefully hoarded in bottles. […]
No one fully understands this boom-and-bust cycle, but meteorologist José Marengo says it has been triggered by a sprawling high-pressure system that settled stubbornly over southeastern Brazil. That region is usually at the end of a long loop of moisture-bearing trade winds. Last year, however, this system went awry. […]
Beginning a year ago … a phenomenon called “atmospheric blocking” transformed that wind pattern. Marengo, a senior scientist at the Brazilian National Center for Early Warning and Monitoring of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN), likens this to a giant bubble that deflected the moisture-laden air, which instead dumped about twice the usual amount of rain over the state of Acre, in western Brazil, and the Bolivian Amazon, where Cartagena lives.
The consequences of that drought in Southern Brazil? Well, among the obvious effect to agriculture and diminished water resources, and loss of hydroelectrical power generation, diseases long thought to be under control have erupted across the region, such as dengue fever.
For six months, taps ran dry 12 hours a day in Gregori Pizzanelli Leccese’s Sao Paulo neighborhood. Many residents stored water just to get by.
It’s no wonder the mosquito population exploded — and so did dengue fever, he said.
“I’ve seen a major increase of mosquitoes in the city over the past five years,” said Leccese, 28, who runs a clothing manufacturer with his father. “There’s no more fumigation like there used to be. I see nothing about prevention education anywhere.”
Leccese is among the 460,500 Brazilians who caught the potentially deadly disease this year through March 28, more than triple the number a year earlier, the Health Ministry said (PDF). Eight thousand of Sao Paulo city’s 12 million residents already have been infected, and the city forecasts 82,000 more cases, almost all in the next few months. The ministry said in March more than 300 other municipalities also are at risk of an epidemic.
[It should be noted that drought in California led to a a record increase in West Nile virus deaths there in 2014]
Want to know about another country, one not often in the news for its climate issues, which is suffering from drought so severe that it is being called, as so many of them are these days, “historic.” Well, say hello to one of charter members of Dubya’s Axis of Evil: North Korea.
North Koreans are again facing a “looming humanitarian disaster in the DPRK,” or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, according to the United Nations human rights chief.
Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told CNN, “We call for the international community to support the DPRK and help the DPRK in a respect of what is going to be a very difficult famine.”
State media, which usually paint only a rosy picture of life for North Korea’s citizens, have been publishing reports about what they call the worst drought in 100 years.
“Their decision to officially report the drought in their internal media is remarkable,” says Andrei Lankov, a professor at South Korea’s Kookmin University. “It’s a signal to both domestic and foreign audience that probably something will go bad later this year. So they will probably apply for foreign aid.”
The U.N.’s Al Hussein warns, “You may well see starvation on a massive scale unless there’s a massive relief effort in the weeks and months to come.”
You know it must be serious if a highly secretive and tyrannical regime, led by a brutal dictator, is begging for help from the world community so its people won’t starve to death. Another of those “100 year droughts” in what has been predicted to be a Century of Drought.
And with drought, one of the consequences is severe wildfires, as we here in the United States are all too familiar. At a time when our Republican led Congress is looking to slash funding for everything not directely related to the Defense budget, the Obama administration is doing its best to allocate resources to wildfire fighting, thought those resources are inadequate at best.
“We have substantial challenges related to our fire budget,” Robert Bonnie, under secretary for natural resources and the environment at the Agriculture Department, told reporters on Friday, according to The Washington Post. These days, Western fire seasons are now “about 60 to 80 days longer than they were three decades ago,” he said. That translates directly into dollars; in 1995, fire suppression accounted for 16 percent of the Forest Service’s annual budget. Now it accounts for more than 40 percent, according to Bonnie. But it still isn’t enough.
As well they should, considering that giant blazes are threatening Lake Tahoe, Big Bear in the San Bernadino National Forest, Arizona, Oregon and Washington (the state), as I write these words. In Alaska alone, nearly 300 hundred wildfires are burning. Yes, Alaska:
Sanford’s new report shows that this year is not an anomaly — it is part of a trend. The report found that there has been an upswing in large Alaskan fires, defined as those that consume more than 1,000 acres, over the past three decades…
Of course, Alaska lies in the region of the world that has been warming the fastest, at a rate much higher than elsewhere.
And this is happening amid a dramatic warming of the Arctic region and of Alaska in particular, which “has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the country,” notes the Climate Central report — 3 degrees over the past 60 years.
The Climate Central report also finds that the Alaskan fire season has lengthened and the acreage being burned in Alaskan fires is increasing. “From 1980 to 2009, the average area burned each year approximately doubled each decade, with at least 8 million more acres burned in the 2000s than in any other decade,” notes the study.
Here’s a graph that illustrates the consequences of that trend all too tellingly:
This, as one firefighter who was quoted in the Washington Post story I cited noted, these extreme fires are the result of climate change, and our response – merely throwing firefighters at the problem – is unsustainable. Not that we are alone in dealing with the problem of wildfires fueled by drought conditions at the moment. A short list from around the world:
Canada –British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Siberia.
Australia (earlier this year)
Our planet is telling us humanity is making changes that are having devastating short and long term consequences for the survival of species on earth. One of those species may be our own. This post documents only a few of those consequences, and only those from the most recent droughts that have spread across the planet. Droughts predicted by climate change models close to two decades ago.
While we should be concerned about the damage to our country from the droughts in the western United States, this is a worldwide phenomenon. It will only get worse, unless we start taking action now to ameliorate the problems we face, but more importantly to cut greenhouse gas emissions and other activities that are accelerating the rare of anthropogenic climate change.
Next year will be a watershed election for a number of reasons, but high on that list is the urgent need for electing politicians who not only accept the reality of climate change and its consequences, but also who have well defined proposals for putting policies in place to do something about it.
