Post 2: Drought
“No country is immune from droughts.” From America to Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia, virtually every nation in every continent fears the possibility of a drought. Although Africa has suffered from 44% of the world’s drought the past century, even Europe has experienced 45 major droughts.
From the year 2000 to 2019, droughts have impacted over 1.4 billion people as it destroys their agriculture, plunges them into famines, kills local animals and ecosystems, and provokes conflicts. By 2040, 1 in 4 children will reside in regions of extreme water shortages. Unfortunately, the majority of the world population will be affected by 2050 and more people are becoming at risk of being displaced.
This is why we have decided to base our upcoming issue’s theme on droughts. The climate fight is long and brutal, so we aim to provide our peers with opportunities to express their thoughts. We hope to raise awareness and thus I have decided to write this blog post about droughts and the stories it has coerced into life.
A Dive into the Meaning of Droughts
As we all know, droughts indicate a serious shortage of water that impacts human communities and ecosystems. They are caused by low levels of rainfall, dry climate conditions, and certain weather patterns, but unlike other natural disasters, this phenomenon occurs gradually and lasts for a variable duration - weeks, months, years, or even decades. Thus, it is often difficult to define their beginnings and ends, except perhaps in retrospect.
There are also manmade causes for droughts, the first most famously being climate change, but also includes deforestation - since less forestry means the soil dries quicker - and high water demand.
As for the types of drought, climatologists classify it into four groups:
Meteorological drought - when a region undergoes dry weather patterns.
Hydrological drought - when a water shortage becomes evident.
Agricultural drought - when crops and farms are affected by the previous two types.
Socioeconomic drought - when the supplies can no longer meet the demands of the region. This is related to the economy.
A fifth and recently acknowledged type of drought is ecological drought - when the effects reach ecosystems in such a way that it decreases animal populations, stresses vegetation, and causes severe and permanent changes on species’ composition. It can tip the balance of nature and harm wildlife through supporting wildfires, encouraging insect infestations, altering the percentages of natural components at the chemical level, and causing great losses in flora and fauna.
2. The Consequences of a Drought
As a natural disaster, droughts may not seem as chaotic as floods or earthquakes, but they have actually been responsible for 650,000 deaths in 40 years and affect more people than any other phenomenon.
On Humans:
Droughts are responsible for a wide number of nutrient deficiencies and diseases. Because of the scarcity of food and clean water, malnutrition, cholera, diarrhoea, and more have become pervasive occurrences. Both the droughts and diseases leave behind famine and death, wrecking havoc and bestowing despair as seen in several historical droughts.
Due to the shortage of clean water, people often have to travel long distances to find water. The burden often falls on females as 72% of women are tasked with water collection which reinforces the sexual division of labour. Moreover, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), “As many as 700 million people are at risk of being displaced as a result of drought by 2030.” In Somalia, over a million people have been displaced by August 2022. Large masses often migrate to other or neighbouring countries in order to escape the horrific conditions they are living in. Unfortunately, that tends to provoke political conflicts or exacerbate them.
On Ecosystems:
An ecological drought, as I explained earlier, goes beyond having impacts on merely humans. It bombards a suffering and suffocating ecosystem with challenges that are often difficult to overcome. Due to the changes in climate, even after recovery from the drought, irreversible changes in species, especially wildlife, are unavoidable.
For the most part, the effects of droughts on ecosystems are dismissed or not given much attention in favour of concerns related to human communities. However, drought research, management, and policies should focus on what it does to the environment as well, because neglecting to think of the environment would come back to bite us.
In addition to affecting species, it destroys their habitats, further imperils endangered species, fuels wildfires, and deteriorates soil quality.
Here are some examples of the consequences of droughts on ecosystems:
The destruction of fish populations in western United States
Widespread wildfire and tree mortality (as what happened in Australia, 2019-2020 during which 3 billion animals were displaced or killed)
High elephant mortality as in Africa
In Kenya, numerous animals are killed as a result of East Africa’s worst drought in decades. For instance, as of November 2022, 205 elephants and 49 Grevy’s zebras - the most endangered of the species of zebra - have passed away.
In the Amazon, as a result of climate change, land-use, and deforestation, three widespread droughts and huge wildfires have troubled its forests. As stated in Droughts in Numbers (2022), “16 percent of the region’s remaining forests will likely burn by 2050.”
Finally, drought is a factor materialising other natural disasters. It increases stress levels and mortality in trees and thus provides an easier target for wildfires. In addition to that, it can also lead to worse floods: heavy rain slides over dry ground lacking vegetation and is not immediately absorbed, prompting a flash flood.
These are all just cold facts and statistics, but they do not mention the psychological and mental effects drought has on the humans suffering from it. No one can truly understand what it means to live in such circumstances, except those who have lived through it.
I cannot tell you the extent of their misery and anguish, but I can share with you some historical droughts that may bring us closer to knowing what they had gone through.
3. Historical and Recent Droughts
There have been countless droughts throughout history that vary in their intensity. We may not know of many, especially those that took place centuries ago, but there are several prominent ones, whose stories I would like to briefly share with you today.
4 of the droughts that shaped the world:
Sub-Saharan Africa, between 135,000 and 75,000 years ago:
A series of megadroughts may have been the stimulant for early humans to migrate and colonise other regions of the world.
Ancient Egypt, 2200 B.C.:
Scientists and archaeologists believe that the drought that occurred in the region was a main factor in the pharaohs’ demise and helped bring about the fall of the Old Kingdom.
Mesoamerica, 760 to 910 A.D.:
The drought had an unfortunate hand in the collapse of the Mayan Empire, which had already been exposed to several conflicts and dwindling resources among other problems we are familiar with in today’s world.
The Dust Bowl, the US Midwest and Canada, 1931-1939:
In the midst of this horror-filled time period, the Great Plains struggled through one of the worst droughts in American history. It is characterised by the monstrous dust storms that gobbled the land and that led to the outbreak of many diseases, killing thousands of people.
Some Recent Droughts:
Many of the wildfires that raged in the US south-west the past year were a result of ongoing droughts. Moreover, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System, more than 43% of the US was in drought by the end of July 2022.
A ravaging drought is deteriorating conditions in the Horn of Africa. Famine is threatening the area and everyone is suffering the consequences. Not only are more children being diagnosed with acute malnutrition, but the rate of maternal mortality, already high, is increasing. Pregnant women are staying hungry for days and mothers are unable to provide clean water and food for their children.
The EU reported the worst drought in 500 years in the summer of 2022 as temperatures recorded high values and rivers are drying up.
4. Droughts in Literature
What I love about literature is that it shows us what science, objective reports, and even history cannot. It goes into the intricacies of human nature, feelings and emotions, and behaviour. It gives us a new perspective on situations we previously considered only through the limited information we have, sheds light on the unseen, and hands the microphone to the unheard.
Two books revolving around the Dust Bowl are The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and The Four Winds by Kristen Hannah. The Dry by Jane Harper is a thriller/crime novel set in a drought-stricken land and Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman follows the consequences of being cut off from water because of an extreme drought in near-future California.
Furthermore, there are plenty of poems about drought, such as The Drought by Gary Soto, Drought by Peggy Pond Church, and Drought by Edith Mirick among others.
Stay on the lookout for some quotes and excerpts on our Instagram! Ripple Lit is open for submissions to its second issue until February 28. We are looking forward to reading what you have to say.
References and Citations:
“Definition of Drought.” Did You Know? | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/dyk/drought-definition#:~:text=As%20a%20result%2C%20the%20climatological,weather%20patterns%20dominate%20an%20area.
“DROUGHT IN NUMBERS 2022 - Restoration for Readiness and Resilience -.” United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
“Drought.” World Health Organization, https://www.who.int/health-topics/drought#tab=tab_2.
“Unfamiliar Territory: Emerging Themes for Ecological Drought Research and Management.” One Earth, https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(20)30428-0.
For more information about ongoing droughts, check out:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/08/drought-water-climate-un/
https://www.aljazeera.com/tag/drought/
Cover photo by Krish Patel