What can we do to prevent or mitigate drought?

Drought

Drought means not enough rainfall. Some places are dry all year round; others just during certain seasons. It depends as much on how many people (and livestock) there are as well as how dry it is; small numbers of people have always survived in some deserts. Even damp places like the UK or the Florida Everglades can experience water shortages some years. Droughts can occur for one season, a year, or several years.

If a drought goes on too long, the soil can become very poor, perhaps being contaminated by mineral salts which prevent crops from growing afterwards.

One of the reasons for drought is the failure, delay or interruption of monsoon rains. The El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) can also cause droughts, for instance in Africa, Australia, India and the former Soviet Union in 1972.

As the climate has warmed up over the past century, some areas have experienced drought. In particular, parts of Asia and Africa have seen more frequent and more intense droughts.

There were major droughts in the 1980s in the areas around the Sahel and the Sahara, due to the monsoon rains not reaching that far. One theory to account for it suggests that sulphur dioxide air pollution from Europe and the USA caused the atmosphere in the Northern Hemisphere to cool in a process called global dimming, which kept the rain belt further south. This was the longest drought since records began, and was particularly bad in 1972, 1975, 1984 and 1985. Europe has since cleaned up this particular kind of pollution and the rains have increased in the area.

In the 1930s many U.S. states experienced a mayor drought and around 50 million acres in the south-central plains were covered by a dust bowl in 1935-1936. In 1980 there was a summer central and eastern U.S. heatwave that killed an estimated 10,000 people. There was an El Niño event in 1982–1983 that disrupted weather patterns around the world; there was drought in the western Pacific region and disastrous forest fires in Indonesia and Australia. In 1988 another 5,000–10,000 people died in a severe drought and heat wave in central and eastern U.S. In 2003 more than more than 1,500 died in India. Also in 2003 more than 14,000 people died in France, and there were record temperatures, deaths, ruined crops and fatal forest fires across much of Europe.

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