Under global warming, droughts are becoming more frequent, prolonged, and intense, with devastating consequences for human communities worldwide. The meteorological drought rapidly propagates into agricultural drought—have expanded by 1.2 million km² over the past 40 years, an area equivalent to South Africa. Concurrently, humid-type partitions have shrunk by 3.84 million km², exceeding India's total area.
Droughts will occur more extensively and frequently worldwide, where the increase in drought-sensitive area will further threaten the stability of global ecosystems. However, the distribution and changes of the drought- sensitive area remain unclear. The distribution and changes of the drought-sensitive area, humid type partition, and arid type partition of the propagation of meteorological drought to agricultural drought during the last 40 years via drought propagation analysis. Globally, drought-sensitive area have increased significantly by 120 × 10 4 km2, an area equivalent to The Republic of South Africa (122 × 10 ), while the humid type partition has decreased significantly by 384 × 104 km2 which is larger than that of India (329 × 10 4 km2 ). It indicates that the risk of drought is increasing significantly globally. Asia and South America are facing the most critical situation among the continents. Notably, the increase of drought-sensitive area and the loss of humid type partition were concentrated in their transition areas, and 6.44 % of humid type partition are changing into drought-sensitive area globally. In these transformation areas, the largest area is forested and agricultural land, which will seriously threaten the stability of the global ecosystem and food security.
Sources:
Journal of Hydrology
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022169424002683 .
Provided by the IKCEST Disaster Risk Reduction Knowledge Service System
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