Faced with perennials in recent years the time when water reserves are dwindling. Persistent perennial droughts on the planet have been becoming more frequent since 1980 and will continue to deteriorate with the rise in temperature, as a warning study by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forestry, Snow and Landscape Research published in Science magazine. CORVERSE An example of how warming causes perennial droughts and acute crises of water reserves in vulnerable areas worldwide is Chile, where 15 years of persistent and destructive drought, the largest over the last 1,000 years, have almost dried up the country’s water reserves. Swiss institute researchers in collaboration with Austria’s Institute of Science and Technology analysed global weather data and modeled droughts during 1980-2018. They showed a worrying increase in perennial droughts that became larger, more frequent and more extreme covering more land. It is estimated that each year drought-affected areas spread on average on an average of an additional 50,000 square kilometres, which corresponds roughly to the extent of Slovakia and this spread causes enormous damage to ecosystems, agriculture and energy production. Through the investigation they mapped not only well documented droughts, but also less known extreme events, such as drought affecting Congo’s rainforest from 2010 to 2018. “While temperate meadows have been most affected in the past 40 years, northern and tropical forests seemed to withstand more effectively the drought and even showed strange results at the start of the drought,” notes Swiss Institute’s senior researcher and study writer, Dirk Karger. Through the publicly available list of droughts published in the context of this research “we hope to help policy makers to focus on more realistic preparation and prevention measures”, stresses Austrian Institute of Science and Technology professor Francesca Pelichiotti, remarking that “at present strategies regard droughts as an annual or seasonal event and this is completely in contrast to the largest and most serious major droughts we will face in the future.”
Extreme droughts are expected to become more common, severe and widespread
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in World