Droughts are interlinked with both the causes, impact and solutions found in floods. Again, the fact that the planet’s lower atmosphere temperature has increased cause the levels of evaporation to increase. While this means in many areas flooding occurs due to heavy rain downpours, other areas will experience no rainfall at all. The drought now being experienced in California USA is the worst in 1,200 years with no relief anticipated for years.
While in the developed countries have the infrastructure and technological expertise to mitigate the impact of droughts to a certain extent, this is not the case for the lesser developed countries where shortages of drinking water and poor quality drinking water is creating long-term public health issues.
There are 5 types of droughts that have varying degrees of socio-economic impact in the affected areas. They are:
Meteorological Drought
These are droughts where dry weather patterns dominate a specific area.
Hydrological Drought
These are droughts whereby low water supply becomes evident in a specific water ecological system.
Agricultural Drought
This is when crops are affected by a drought.
Socioeconomic Drought
This refers to a situation when supply from a regional water resource system cannot meet the demands for water.
Ecological Drought
This refers to a reduction in water supply that impacts natural and human ecosystems. This potentially could drive local species of wildlife and marine life to population reduction or extinction.
The health hazards created by droughts can be as severe as those heath issues caused by floods. In addition to the shortages of either adequate drink water and / or poor drinking water that arise from droughts, air quality is impacted due to the increase of dust particles, sanitation is under pressure along with food and nutrition are usually under threat. Disease such as the West Nile Virus transmitted by mosquitoes become more common place due to increased frequency of stagnant water.
In terms of solutions drought reduction is very similar to the solutions associated with floods. Clearly the reduction of deforestation and of greenhouse emissions will certainly help in reducing the temperature of the lower atmosphere which in turn will reduce the evaporation rate in drought sensitive areas.
