Approximately one million people including children below the age of five require government and international intervention every year. Over the past decade, academics and policymakers have vigorously debated the question of whether climate change poses a security threat, with particular emphasis on whether it causes internal conflict. Although water deficits are hard to measure globally, one approach is to model water balances by combining rainfall, temperature, geography, evaporation rates, and other factors to estimate water anomalies, where amounts of surface water will be higher and lower than normal. Torrential rains and flash floods, poverty, and diseases worsen the situation. During July, a long lasting heatwave impacted northern Europe leading to well above-average temperatures as far north as the Arctic Circle. But an additional six countries not included in the top 25 percent for ten-year or 30-year deficits in the 2017–2018 list—Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Mali, and Niger—are projected to rise into the top quartile by June 2019. The Thar Desert in the southern part of the country has been abandoned as thousands of people and millions of livestock migrate in search of humane conditions. Hot and dry conditions turned many green fields brown as the summer of 2018 progressed.
The 3,500,000 Square-Mile Sahara Desert spans across the entire North Africa region and is quickly encroaching into east Africa. This drastic color change has happened over just a couple of months. The World Bank recently rolled out a pilot of its Famine Action Mechanism, which tries to anticipate famine locations using machine learning. Difference from average height of the 500-mb pressure level during July 2018 across Europe. Arable land is found along the banks of the river. A drought is a stage during which farmers are urgently waiting for rain because … In particular, July was incredibly hot for northern Europe. The two largest deserts in the world occupy the coldest places on earth, the Arctic, and the Antarctic. Prolonged heat and dryness during the summer of 2018 has turned formerly green fields into dusty, dying patches of soil all across Europe, leading to drought across many countries. Countries where violence has ceased, however, can benefit from building their capacities to detect and respond to crises, and from improving job opportunities. About 18.22% of the country’s arable land is under vegetation, 12.62% is forest cover while the rest is desert. Between 1998-2002, Pakistan experienced the worst drought in 50 years. NOAA Climate.gov image using data from NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis. The political scientist Judith M. Bretthauer defines “high” political exclusion as occurring in countries where at least 20 percent of the population is formally excluded from political power. //-->. About 71.89% of Uganda is agricultural land, 34.41% is arable land and 10.36% is under forest cover. Grab and drag the slider to compare the before (left) and after (right) satellite images of the greenness across northern Europe. High agricultural dependence means that a particularly large proportion of citizens’ livelihoods are bound up in farming. Despite years of government interventions, the situation in northern Uganda remains critical. Today, the situation has gotten worse. At our request, ISciences aggregated its subnational data and ranked all the countries in the world in terms of both the share of their population and the proportion of their territory that experienced water deficits between October 2017 and September 2018, as well as a similar list including projected water deficits until June 2019. Globally, over two billion people live in countries that experience high water stress (UN-Water 2019 from UN, 2018). Sweden observed around 50 forest fires during the peak of the heat in mid-July, which, according to the World Meteorological Organization, was the worst outbreak of forecast fires in modern records.

Countries facing the three aforementioned risk factors will struggle to deal with climate shocks. Difference from average surface temperatures across Europe during July 2018. July was warm. And this incredibly resilient high pressure system has stuck around for the most part for several months! To read their entire report, please go here. In fact, several risk factors make some countries more vulnerable than others to the consequences of climate change. About 2.5 million people have been affected and need help for the government and the international aid. The country is currently facing a major food shortage that has exposed 1.3 million people to starvation. The city normally sees fewer than 25 days a year with a high over 68°F. Please enable JavaScript for this site to function properly. What should policymakers do with this information? Poor harvests and recurrent insecurity in some regions of Ethiopia has led to food instability and falling food reserves across the country. According to the European Commission’s European Drought Observatory, much of northern Europe is under some form of dryness. The deserts of China are spreading at an annual average of 1,300 square miles a situation that has seen the government deploy soldiers to plant trees. They will see more extreme consequences, and their already fragile governments will become even more hard pressed to manage violence and feed their populations. Their preliminary analysis found that human-cause climate change has increased the likelihood of this summer’s heat wave by five times in Denmark, three times in the Netherlands, and two times in Ireland. Finland as a whole set its all-time hottest July as well. So what happened in the following two months?

In some countries, such as Malawi and Somalia, over 80 percent of the workforce is employed in agriculture. According to the European Commission’s European Drought Observatory, much of northern Europe is under some form of dryness. I’ve already written about what can happen in Europe if hot weather is combined with dry vegetation and the right atmospheric conditions. And when waters warm that fast, conditions become favorable for blooms of dangerous algae. The construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam on the Blue Nile threatens to reduce the flow of water on the Nile, consequentially escalating the drought in Sudan. However, a third of the land mass is considered desert.

Before such systems reach their full potential, however, our list can help detect which countries are likely to become hot spots of climate instability and humanitarian crises. The southern part of the country experiences rainfall of between 100 mm and 200 mm in a year. In Afghanistan, 64 percent of the population had been exposed to a thirty-year drought; in Yemen, the figure was 43 percent, and in Somalia, 34 percent. Patrick Kormawa, the Sub-Regional Coordinator for FAO in S… We have used these factors to identify the countries that are most at risk from climate-related instability and humanitarian crises in the coming years. A hot, dry summer has led to drought in Europe in 2018, Extreme event attribution: the climate versus weather blame game, Exceptional drought in parts of seven states in U.S. Southwest, Drought worsens across southern Plains and southwestern United States, Longer dry spells in store for U.S. Great Plains, Flash drought engulfs the U.S. Southeast in September 2019, Over a million acres burned in California in second half of August 2020, Hot, dry summer and slow start to wet season primed California for November 2018 fires, August 2020: The warmest summer on record for the Northern Hemisphere comes to an end. The risk factors we identify are, naturally, not the only conditions that can contribute to instability and humanitarian crises. African and Asian countries are the most affected by desertification. But an additional six countries not included in the top 25 percent for ten-year or 30-year deficits in the 2017–2018 list—Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Mali, and Niger—are projected to rise into the top quartile by June 2019. Why are these specific risk factors so important? The Congo forest covers eastern Uganda, but the northern part bordering South Sudan is exposed to the encroaching Sahara. The third factor, discriminatory political institutions—those that marginalize certain social groups or exclude them from power—increases the risk of instability and humanitarian emergencies by making governments less responsive to segments of their population. About 2.8 million people in Sudan are affected by drought every year. Red colors reflect warmer than average conditions while blue colors indicate cooler than average conditions. The World Weather Attribution group, an international partnership between six research centers/groups including NOAA’s National Center for Atmospheric Research, looked at weather observations from seven stations located across northern Europe in Ireland, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in attempt to determine any connection to climate change. The spring was not very warm and the heat of summer came suddenly. (At least two more countries, Cameroon and Ethiopia, had high levels of discrimination not captured by the EPR dataset.). We used data from Uppsala Conflict Data Program to identify the more than 40 countries that had recorded conflicts (defined as a conflict to which the state was a party) in the five years prior to 2018. It is a relatively small country but with a population of 41 million. Nine of those countries, indicated on the map, also had high agricultural dependence and a recent history of conflict. What Are The Effects Of A Drought On The Environment? Up to a million people are threatened by starvation, most of whom are children and women. In Estonia, the minister for Rural Affairs said that it is expected that between 30 and 70% of the summers crops could fail. Crops wilt while farmers and herders are in desperate need of water for their farmlands and animals. The area experiences constant drought that leaves half a million people with very little food and water.

The second risk factor, recent violence, can also combine with climate shocks to produce crises: more than 40 percent of countries experiencing a food crisis in 2017 carried this double burden.

And given the particular susceptibility of agriculture to changes in the climate, governments and international institutions need to urgently consider how agricultural practices can be adapted to meet these changes and prevent large declines in crop yields. A drought is a stage during which farmers are urgently waiting for rain because … About three million people in Shanxi Province in northern China are in dire need of water while a third of the wheat crop in the area dry up due to lack of irrigation or rainwater.


Afghanistan is among the driest and most barren countries in the world. The effects of the drought are already impacting farmers throughout Europe.