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Drought a 'hidden risk' due to lack of data - UN

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:21 GMT

Source: alertnet // Soumya Karlamangla

Somali women displaced by severe drought conditions queue to get food handouts at a centre operated by the government and local NGOs, south of Mogadishu, on July 7, 2011. REUTERS/Feisal Omar

(Corrects errors made in report and updated by researchers on July 12.)

By Soumya Karlamangla

LONDON (AlertNet) - Droughts pose one of the most serious threats to human safety, yet get little notice as they ravage food supplies and economies around the world, according to an analysis from the United Nations.

This year’s Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction, which examines ways to minimize the damage from and prevent disasters, focuses on the causes and impacts of droughts and warns that without better data collection, droughts will continue to wreak havoc on developing nations.

“Drought remains a hidden risk,” said Andrew Maskrey, the coordinator of the report, at its United Kingdom launch last week. “Because we don’t really have the figures on the risk, (including) whether it’s going up or down, it’s not really on anyone’s agenda with the sort of profile we think it merits.”

Droughts are responsible for deaths and economic losses every year, but assessing these damages can be complicated. Unlike a hurricane that sweeps through an area and kills people, a drought causes crop shortages that reduce farmers’ profits and make it difficult for them to feed their families - a complicated interplay of social and economic factors that develop over time and that are difficult to blame squarely on drought.

DIFFICULTY GETTING NUMBERS

The difficulty in getting exact numbers is one reason reducing risks from drought is so difficult, the report’s authors said. For instance, water shortages, dry soil, and low levels of rainfall all usually fall under the umbrella of drought but are distinctly different.

Meteorological drought, or a drop in precipitation levels, is not necessarily a hazard, the study notes. The rainfall shortage only becomes a problem when other social or economic factors, like poor water management or food insecurity, come into play.

Those problems can create agricultural drought, in which soils cannot grow crops or support livestock, or hydrological drought, when there is insufficient water in reserves like lakes and streams. Both problems can hurt livelihoods and food security.

The report points out that with all the contributors to drought disasters - reduced rainfall, poverty, a higher demand for water due to urbanization and bad management of water and soil, among many others – they can be challenging to identify and measure. Most governments have little record of the losses caused by drought, giving them equally little incentive to make systematic changes to address it, the report said.

DROUGHT LOSSES

Droughts are expected to become more common in many parts of the world as global changes in climate affect precipitation. Chinese farmers suffered nearly 8 billion dollars in lost crops as a result of droughts between 2004 and 2007, the study said. It predicted those losses could rise because climate shifts are expected to decrease precipitation in the area and reduce the total agricultural yield by 6 to 7 percent by 2030, the report said.

A study released last month by researchers from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research found that in less than 40 years, drier growing seasons could make populations in many parts of the world vulnerable to major food shortages.

After looking at regions that have a history of food insecurity, are highly dependent on agriculture and are likely to experience shifts in average temperature and rainfall over the next 40 years, scientists determined that millions of people could be without food by 2050.

“Generally speaking, large areas of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and … Nepal, Bangladesh come up on the maps as being highly vulnerable,” said Phil Thornton, one of the paper’s co-authors.

The already 266 million food-insecure people living in agriculture-intensive parts of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa will face a five percent decrease in the length of the growing season, which will reduce crop yields, the report said. And temperatures in regions of West Africa, India and China, where 170 million already food-insecure and crop-dependent people live, could exceed the maximums that staple crops like beans, maize and rice can comfortably tolerate, the report said.

Droughts are also expected to become more common, according to recent research that points to global warming as a driver of extreme weather events. Scientists from the Pew Center for Global Climate Change published a paper last month noting that while climate change does not directly cause extreme weather, it does increase the frequency and severity of it.

RISK FACTORS

 “Global warming is a risk factor for extreme weather in the same way that eating salty food is a risk factor for heart disease,” said Jay Gulledge, a senior scientist and director of the Science and Impacts Program for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, at a press conference last month. “The statistics of climate tell us that the odds of extreme weather events are rising.”

Extreme flooding that typically affected a region only every 500 years may now come every 100 years, and with more force, he said. The same goes for drought.

To deal with the growing problems, the world needs to begin properly monitoring the damage caused by drought and raise awareness about its dangers, the UN assessment report argues. Because food production needs to increase by 70 percent by 2050 to meet growing population and demand, starting now to assess and address the risk from drought is imperative, the report said.

 “Strengthening drought risk management, as an integral part of risk governance, will be fundamental to sustaining the quality of life in many countries during the coming decades,” the report said.

Soumya Karlamangla is an AlertNet Climate intern.