22 hours Ago
The cruel irony is, critics say, that this is only the start of a crisis set to spiral out of control with disastrous impacts on food, water, and energy security.
Africa is confronting hunger and displacement everywhere
In the dry eastern and southern Africa alone, over 90 million people are already facing severe hunger because of a prolonged drought. One quarter of the population is at a threshold of starvation in Somalia, and over a million people have been displaced. Zimbabwe’s corn harvest fell 70 percent last year, and 9,000 cattle died for want of water and grazing.
These conditions are the result of years of climate stress, with one-sixth of southern Africa requiring food aid as early as last August. The extent of the crisis is laid out in a new report from the US National Drought Mitigation Center (NMDC), the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the International Drought Resilience Alliance. Mark Svoboda, a founding director of the NMDC, said that this is the worst he has seen, and that it is a “slow-moving global catastrophe.”
Drought in the 21st Century: From Africa to the Americas
The crisis is not confined to Africa. In Latin America, depleted water supplies at the Panama Canal brought world trade to a near halt for more than two months, from October 2023 until January 2024, when traffic in the canal dropped by more than a third. Morocco has had six consecutive years of drought, which has led to a 57% water deficit. Spain's olive production plummeted by 50%, which doubled the cost of olive oil.
In Turkey, 88 percent of the nation’s land is now under threat of desertification, as the country’s water demand for agriculture has depleted its aquifers and caused sinkholes.
Global warming pattern – seawater has begun to boil and droughts started in 2023 and 2024, as El Niño phenomena are worsening the climate, which leads to several heatwaves and a lack of rainfall - Power shortages, food shortages. Key global crops, including rice, coffee, and sugar, have been affected, too. Drought in Thailand and India resulted in a sugar shortage that drove prices up 9 percent in the United States.
Svoboda cautioned that nations such as Spain, Morocco, and Turkey are a harbinger for the world. “No country, no matter how wealthy or how powerful, can turn the tide alone,” he said.
The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization and Water: The Destiny of a Planet.
The Wednesday report underscores the chasm between global water demand and supply. It foresees as much as a 40% gap between water supply and demand by 2030 and more than half the world? 's food production in jeopardy by mid-century. Other findings showed an “unprecedented” decline in glacier ice, putting the water supply of 2 billion people at risk.
This ‘drought-stricken land’ has been revealed to have doubled over the past 120 years, according to data recorded by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The economic toll is also rising precipitously: The price of the average drought in 2035 is projected to be 35 percent higher than it is today.
Drought is too often overshadowed by other topics in the media, Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, said, yet its impacts are devastating around the world. “Drought is a silent killer. It sneaks up on you, takes resources away from you, and ruins lives in slow motion,” he said, urging increasing cooperation ahead of a dystopian future in which energy, food, and water systems fail simultaneously.
“That’s the new normal we have to be prepared for,” he cautioned.
