Report warns that climate refugees will be affected by worsening water scarcity in the developing world.
According to the United Nations, droughts have increased by 29% within a short time span. This was according to Wednesday’s paper. It also noted that the situation is quickly changing. Released to coincide with the 15th annual Conference of Parties held by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, the “Drought in Numbers 2022” report reveals that droughts comprise just 15% of natural disasters but account for 45% of disaster-related deaths, along with an encyclopedia of other disturbing statistics.
According to the report, droughts caused $124 billion in global economic losses between 1998-2017. The report also found that droughts claimed 650,000 lives in the period 1970-2019. It is estimated that more than 2.3 billion people live in water-insecure areas, with 160 million of them children. Since 1980, the US has seen $249 billion in drought-related economic losses.
The report states that climate refugees could be possible if there is no action to combat the worsening drought. By 2040, a quarter of the world’s children will live in places with “Extreme” water shortages, and by 2050, over three quarters of the population could be similarly affected. There are currently 3.6 billion people living in water-scarce areas, with a total of 4.8 billion and 5.7 billion respectively.
In total, worsening drought conditions combined with crop failures, sea-level rises, and overpopulation could force as many as 216 million people to leave their homes, according to the report – worsening existing refugee crises and ambushing governments unprepared for such catastrophes.
Regarding solutions, UN Convention to Combat Desertification Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw has focused his efforts on land restoration, suggesting governments build landscapes capable of “It is possible to imitate nature” with “Functional ecological systems.” He cites the example of Niger, where farmers have rebuilt agroforestry systems on 12 million acres of land over the past two decades, as a success story to be emulated.
Africa suffers more than any other continent from the effects of drought, with the UN having recorded some 300 critical drought events over the last century – nearly half (44%) the global total. Asia has the highest number of people at greatest risk due to drought, despite having a larger population. Additionally, Australia’s severe droughts in recent years are believed to have caused the “mega fires” that preceded the Covid-19 epidemic on the continent from 2019 to 2020, killing or displacing three billion animals. Even Europe is said to be suffering to a growing extent from agricultural losses related to drought, as is North America, while South America’s Amazon rainforest is expected to lose 16% of its remaining mass by 2050 if behavioral patterns are not changed.
Thiaw called for shifting the UN’s approach from reacting to crises to anticipating them, calculating risk and acting accordingly before the situation becomes untenable. This, he says, will require effective early warning systems, sufficient funds, and the political will to get the job done – no small ask from an organization with 196 member states. Regardless of how humanity deals with the problem, the world is facing “An upward trend in drought duration and severity,” he writes, “Not only are they affecting the human society, but the ecology systems that support all life and our species..”
Other solutions proposed in the report include the usual UN goals like reducing meat consumption and land use, increasing surveillance of both nature and human activity to create “Alert systems for early warning,” deploying artificial intelligence to evaluate and manage problems, declaring large areas of land off-limits to human use, using narratives to elicit desired social behaviors, and building supranational control systems as an end-run around uncooperative local politics, much the same as the UN has sought with regard to climate change.
Merely telling stories about droughts can have an effect, one 2017 case study found – inserting 100 drought stories into the news cycle over two months led to a reduction of between 11 and 18% in household water use in California. Ultimately, the organization hopes to restore one billion hectares of “Degraded” land by 2030 and preemptively tackle “Droughts that are becoming more severe, sand-dust storms, wildfires, and other catastrophe risks.,” in many cases by removing humans from the equation – i.e “The futureproofing of land uses against the effects of climate change”
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