Recent droughts are a “global disaster with slow evolution”

From Somalia to continental Europe, the last two years have seen some of the most devastating droughts in recorded history, aggravated by climate change, according to a report supported by the UN.

Describing drought as a “silent killer” who “stops, drains resources and devastates lives in slow motion”, the report declared that he had exacerbated problems such as poverty and collapse of the ecosystem.

The report highlighted the impacts in Africa, the Mediterranean, Latin America and Southeast Asia, including around 4.4 million people in Somalia faced with food insecurity at the level of the crisis at the start of this year.

He recommends that governments prepare for a “new normal” with measures including stronger early alert systems.

“This is a slow global disaster, the worst that I have ever seen,” said the co-author, Dr. Mark Svoboda, founding director of the National Drought MititiGigation Center.

“This report underlines the need for systematic monitoring of the way in which drought affects the lives, livelihoods and the health of the ecosystems on which we all depend.”

The report on drought hotspots in the world identifies the most seriously affected regions from 2023 to 2025.

Meanwhile, the effects of global change warming have been aggravated by an El Niño, a natural climate phenomenon that affects global weather conditions.

An El Niño occurs when surface water in the east and the center of the Tropical Pacific Ocean become unusually hot.

This often leads to dry conditions in regions such as southern Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, northern South America and Southeast Australia.

Human pressure, for example, using irrigation in agriculture, has also put pressure on water resources.

In January 2023, the worst drought in 70 years had struck the horn of Africa, coming from years of rainy seasons failed in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia.

This follows the death of around 43,000 people in Somalia in 2022 under the hunger linked to drought.

African fauna has also been affected, hippopotams in Botswana stranded in dry river beds and elephants slaughtered in Zimbabwe and Namibia to feed hungry communities and prevent overgrazing.

The report underlines how drought strikes the most vulnerable people in the world, including the hardest women, with often deep impacts on society.

Forced children’s weddings have more than doubled in four regions of East Africa, the hardest by drought, while families rushed to secure dowry to survive, he noted.

“The adaptation mechanisms that we saw during this drought have become more and more desperate,” said the main author Paula Guastelo. “The girls left school and forced themselves in marriage, the hospitals becoming dark and families digging holes in the dry river beds just to find contaminated water – these are signs of serious crisis.”

While the low and average income countries brought the weight of the devastation, none could afford to be complacent, indicates the report, noting how two years of drought and heat recording cut the olive tree of Spain in two.

In the Amazon basin, record low water levels killed by fish and put more dolphins in danger more at risk as well as drinking water supplies for hundreds of thousands of people.

And drought even had an effect on world trade – between October 2023 and January 2024, the water levels dropped so much in the Panama Canal that daily transits have gone from 38 to 24.

“Drought is not only a meteorological event – it can be a social, economic and environmental emergency,” said the co -author of the Dr. Kelly Helm Smith report.

“The question is not whether it will happen again, but if we will be better prepared next time.”