(Bloomberg) – Serious drought has fueled the forest fires in Los Angeles. But a new study, published on Thursday in the magazine Science, comes with a warning: climate change makes catastrophic, multi -year 'mega -drugs' around the world much worse.
Droughts are relative: for example, a drought in the normal rainy Seattle can register as an unusually wet period in a dryer climate such as Phoenix, Arizona. But they can disrupt ecosystems, sometimes in dangerous ways.
“That is what we see in California,” says Dirk Nikolaus Karger, senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute WSL and author of an article. “Over time, the vegetation dries out, which increases the frequency of fires and burning out houses. In other areas we will be confronted with agricultural losses. ”
The fires in California are caused by just eight months with little rainfall. Although climate change contributes to more whimsical precipitation in the west of the US, the new article gives a global picture of the droughts that have taken place in recent years. The researchers were motivated to do so after Karger and co-author Francesca Pellicciotti had spent a while in Chile, in the middle of the drought that started in 2010.
“The consequences were devastating, from ecosystems to agriculture,” says Pellicciotti, professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria. The drought has led to periodic water ration, including in Santiago, the capital of the country, and to disruptions in mining, an important part of the Chilean economy. In 2021 and 2022, Antopagasta, the London -based Chilean multinational, said to be forced to lower production due to the drought. In September, Google said it stopped the plans for the construction of a large data center due to water problems.
To find out how many other places have experienced comparable mega-drying, researchers looked at precipitation and vegetation data. They also looked at spatial data to see how much consequences the droughts had in the area.
They discovered that Megadroogtes have hit every continent except Antarctica in the last forty years. Mongolia, Southeast Australia and the west of the US belonged to the regions with the highest density of serious, multi-year droughts. The longest drought in their research, however, was one in the eastern Congo peaks, which lasted ten years. It covered 576,924 square miles (1,494,226 square kilometers), an area that was about twice as large than Texas.
The researchers also discovered that climate change causes an increase in the areas where there is multi -year drought.
“The extent to which these droughts increase in surface area per year is roughly the size of Switzerland,” says Liangzhi Chen, postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute WSL and the main author of the research.
As mega -drying increases their reach, the damage they can cause also increases. Worldwide dries ensure that five times as many people migrate than floods. According to an analysis of the World Bank, dry periods are responsible for saving more than half a percent on GDP in countries with low and middle incomes. And as the climate gets warmer, the problem probably only gets worse.
(First paragraph corrects the name of the magazine from 'Nature' to 'Science'.)
. of these kinds of stories are available on Bloomberg.com
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