Droughts occurring simultaneously across different regions of the world could place an unprecedented strain on the global agricultural systems threatening the water and food security of millions of people, recent collaborative research has found out.
Continuing fossil fuel dependence will increase the probability of co-occurring droughts 40 per cent by the mid-21st century and 60 per cent by the late 21st century, relative to the late-20th century. That comes out to an approximately nine-fold increase in agricultural and human population exposure to severe co-occurring droughts unless steps are taken to lower carbon emissions, said the study carried out by researchers from the Washington State University, Vancouver, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, the Columbia University, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar.
\u201cThere could be around 120 million people across the globe simultaneously exposed to severe compound droughts each year by the end of the century. Many of the regions that our analysis shows will be most affected are already vulnerable, and so the potential for droughts to become disasters is high,\u201d said lead author Jitendra Singh, a former postdoctoral researcher at the WSU School of the Environment, now at ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
The elevated risk of compound droughts estimated by the research team is a result of a warming climate coupled with a projected 22 per cent increase in the frequency of El Nino and La Nina events – the two opposite phases of the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO). (IANS)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Droughts occurring simultaneously across different regions of the world could place an unprecedented strain on the global agricultural systems threatening the water and food security of millions of people, recent collaborative research has found out.Continuing fossil fuel dependence will increase the probability of co-occurring droughts 40 per cent by the mid-21st century and 60 per […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251083","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251083","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251083"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251083\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}