Lessons from a California drought
Rain finally arrived in California this past December with a series of storms dumping deluges across the state. So much rain fell that localised flooding and landslides were a concern. Whether this means that the three-year drought, which stands to be the driest “in over a millennium” is breaking, however, is far from certain.
The drought has devastated California’s agriculture and driven LA residents to rip out their lush green lawns. There has been something apocalyptic in the air as farmers drained the state’s aquifers last year, and vast reservoirs were sucked dry,sparking water wars. As 2015 begins, 99% of the state is rated ‘abnormally dry’.
It has been much debated whether climate change has been at work across California – and the western United States more generally. At a global level, 2014 is now confirmed as the warmest year on record. Noted scientist Peter Gleick argues that the rising temperatures in California along with atmospheric shifts (like the band of high pressure that sat along the Pacific coast in 2013 keeping storms at bay) are the “fingerprints” of human-induced climate change and they’ve been making the drought worse. But the western United States is also naturally arid – early explorers labelled the region the ‘Great American Desert’ on their maps.
Critical drought has been impacting agriculture around the world. BBC Radio 4’s Shared Planet programme recently reported on the impact of drought in East Africa and the plight of pastoralists in the region, while the drought in Brazil, which is hitting its three most populous regions, is being characterised as “the worst… since 1930”. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that drought will increasingly impact food security across the world, and water management must be given greater consideration. This is one area where the water issues of California and the western United States might offer a significant lesson on living in drought.
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