The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) - with the support of scientific partners from CIMA Research Foundation, United Nations University, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam - have officially released and presented the World Drought Atlas at the UNCCD COP16 in Riyadh.
Desertification, land degradation and droughts aggravate economic, social and environmental problems including water and food security, health, migration and forced displacement. These are global challenges for climate security that requires urgent action and scaling up of viable solutions. The World Drought Atlas shows the current conditions and the emerging risks. It also offers concrete elements to boost actions to achieve drought resilience and climate security.
The atlas delves into five cascading and interconnected impacts of drought risks on climate security: food security, mobility, health, conflict, and land degradation. The connections between these impacts underscore the importance of taking a systemic perspective for managing drought risks. This can reduce the occurrence or the severity of cascading risks, which have the potential to create significant negative consequences for climate security.
Food Security:
Drought is often one of the shocks that may trigger acute food insecurity. For example, it is considered to have been the primary contributor of acute food insecurity in the Horn of Africa in 2023, particularly in Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Burundi and Uganda. In this region, prolonged drought conditions since 2020 have led to multiple consecutive failed agricultural seasons, particularly affecting rain-fed farmers and pastoral communities. Droughts can also lead to transitory food insecurity, i.e. a short-term or temporary inability to meet food consumption requirements related to sporadic crises, indicating a capacity to recover. When drought becomes recurrent and impacts vulnerable populations, it can also become a driver of persistent or cyclical acute food insecurity, which is a form of chronic food insecurity
Human Mobility
The causality between natural hazards, environmental change and human mobility is rarely direct and this is particularly true of drought. Drought affects people's ability to grow or buy sufficient food and, when these impacts reach a sufficient threshold, people may decide to move. When people have agency in their decision to move, migration can bring positive outcomes and may be viewed as climate change adaptation. When there is less choice in whether, when and where to move, it is termed displacement, which tends to bring worse outcomes than migration.
When drought hits an area where people largely depend on agriculture for subsistence and livelihoods, the impact on incomes and food security can affect both people's aspiration (or the need) to move as well as their ability to do so. On the other hand, the drought-induced loss of income may reduce people’s ability to engage in longer-distance and more costly migration. In situation where the aspiration to move increases beyond capabilities, the term “trapped populations” has been used to describe these cases.
Human Health
Besides affecting livelihoods, droughts have direct and indirect impacts on people’s health. These impacts are determined by several underlying vulnerability drivers at individual and societal levels including socio-economic status, access to services and resources and pre-existing health conditions. Direct impacts of droughts interact with these drivers, affecting circumstances of living to the point of triggering a series of health effects, even increasing the risk of morbidity and mortality.
While the understanding of health effects of drought is an emerging field with incomplete evidence, it is possible to recognise five broad categories of impacts:
- malnutrition issues,
- water contamination and water-related diseases,
- respiratory disorders,
- vector-borne diseases
- and mental health impacts.
The health sector itself can also be impacted by drought conditions, through lack of water or water contamination, electricity outage, lack of food and impacts on health workers. It is therefore essential to increase the awareness of the public health actors about the relationship between droughts and health, as this would allow to tackle some of the health vulnerabilities that are triggered during droughts.
Conflict
When water security, i.e. access to adequate water resources, is not guaranteed, safe and stable, this can lead to disputes, tensions or even armed conflicts, thereby significantly impacting climate security. These may occur at any level: between individuals, communities and even countries. Droughts can contribute to these conflictual interactions by making water resources scarcer in the short- or medium-term, thus aggravating existing tensions or creating new ones.
However, there is no simplistic cause-effect mechanism between drought and conflict onset, as multiple contextual factors exert strong influence on the latter. Three ways in which water interacts with conflicts have been identified:
- Water can be the trigger of the conflict (disputes are fought over scarce water resources).
- Water is the weapon used during the conflict (water infrastructure are used as tools to target the population).
- Water is the casualty of the conflict (where water infrastructure or resources are incidentally or intentionally affected).
Land Degradation
Drought will directly and indirectly impact land degradation in both forested and agricultural landscapes. Land degradation can trigger a chain of events threatening climate security leading to population displacements and possibly migrations. This has adverse social and economic consequences for rural populations, especially in developing countries. For instance, in the Ethiopian Highlands migration is an important household adaptation strategy because of severe land degradation amplified by recurring droughts. At the same time, severe land degradation can also have a feedback effect on regional climate, increasing system vulnerability (e.g. by increasing droughts occurrence).
Combating land degradation through sustainable land management and restoration is crucial not only to reduce drought risks, but also for ensuring food security, building climate resilience and ultimately safeguarding human well-being and climate security.
Forward-looking, proactive and prospective approaches to drought, rather than reactive ones, are essential for creating impactful policies that could ultimately reduce climate security risks in these areas.
These are extracts from the Drought Atlas, December 2024. The full Atlas can be accessed via the link here.