Drought News

In the western United States, natural periods of fire and snow are cyclical. The summer brings wildfire season, and the winter brings ski season. But as the globe warms, these…

Climate change-induced higher temperatures, shifting seasons, extreme drought and precipitation events, extended heat waves and fires are all impacting insects, with resonating effects on habitats, other wildlife and humanity.

Likely the world’s most popular garment, jeans use huge amounts of water to grow irrigated cotton, a major factor in destroying the Aral Sea. Today, the industry, though making sustainability pledges, still does much harm.

La Campana National Park, located in Chile’s Valparaíso region, is considered a jewel. It’s a biodiversity oasis in one of the most densely populated areas of the country. Inside the…

Recent months have delivered a harvest of agroforestry funding news in the U.S., just as the season’s remaining crops ripened. The announcement of over $60 million in support from the…

TERBOL, Lebanon — Sitting cross-legged in the summer sun, Fatima collects seedpods from fava beans in Terbol, a quiet village surrounded by cypress trees and vineyards in the Beqaa Valley…

Scientists warn that the Amazon is hurtling toward a tipping point, beyond which it would begin to transition from lush tropical forest into a dry, degraded savanna, unable to support…

The world’s largest rainforest makes its own weather. Up to half of all the rainfall in the Amazon comes from the forest itself, as moisture is recycled from the trees…

OCOTLÁN DE MORELOS – “Look up to the El Peral mountains. That is where we do our ritual ceremony to call for rain,” says Josefina Santiago, 43, a Zapotec Indigenous…

Climate scientists say there’s a 0.1% chance of keeping warming below 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) by 2100, as called for in the Paris Agreement. Even the less ambitious target of…

When Brazilian farmer Hamilton Guterres Jardim realized the latest drought had wiped out two-thirds of his soy crop, he felt emotionally and financially shaken up, he told Mongabay. As a…

As freshwater “Day Zero” looms for the climate change-stressed Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality, home to 1.28 million people, officials face a difficult choice: risk failure of short-term groundwater supplies or seek long-term solutions.

In October 2021, the city of Guriel in Somalia’s Galguduud region became the epicenter of fierce fighting between the national army and a paramilitary group that left more than 100…

While modern water infrastructure assets such as dams and aqueducts have provided human civilization with electricity and potable water for a long time, it has also deprived us of it…

Freshwater’s life-giving benefits are being gravely threatened by humanity’s manipulations of the hydrological cycle, impacting the climate and biodiversity, and undermining Earth’s operating system.

It was over twenty years ago when locals in Bolivia’s northern plains told archaeologist Heiko Prümers, with the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn, about mysterious mounds of earth in the…

KIRKWOOD, South Africa — About 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, inland from the coastal city of Gqeberha, a brilliant patch of green stands out against a landscape recovering from six…

BARINGO COUNTY, Kenya – Last December in the town of Marigat, in Kenya's central Baringo county, Paul Chepsoi had to excuse himself from a dinner of nyama choma (roasted goat)…

The Mediterranean is a cradle — of civilization, of agriculture, of history. But the region, stretching across southern and southeastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, is also a…

Dams fragment rivers, endanger aquatic species, emit large amounts of carbon and methane, cause deforestation, and hurt traditional communities, but we still need their benefits. Scientific management may be the answer.

PEKANBARU, Indonesia — Upon his inauguration as governor of Riau in early 2019, Syamsuar promised to “protect the dignity of Indonesia” by ensuring that the vast Sumatran province, home to…

Scholars and political leaders worldwide are fretting over the complex connections between climate and insecurity. Many social scientists theorize that climate disruption is a “conflict multiplier.” To residents of the…

The transition zone between the Amazon and the Cerrado, where the world’s greatest rainforest melds into its largest tropical savanna, is heating up, posing severe threats to both biomes, a…

The fires were still several miles away, but Talía Zamboni and her colleagues wanted to work fast. Early in the morning on Feb. 23, they traveled to San Alonso Island…

Forest degradation due to environmental causes (such as drought) and human causes (such as fragmentation) released three times as much carbon as deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2010 and 2019, say researchers.

A forest fire that has been spreading for weeks in Chile’s Tierra del Fuego is threatening the ancestral land of an Indigenous group and destroying some of the world’s highest…

The ongoing drought in Paraguay, now moving into its third year, has put increasing pressure on conservation efforts throughout the country to support local communities and protect wildlife. Record-breaking heat…

Initiatives to inject billions of aerosol particles into the stratosphere to deflect solar rays and cool Earth are too risky to go forward; governments must act fast to rein in potentially disastrous planetary-scale solar geoengineering, say critics.

HARARE, Zimbabwe – Women, children and the elderly are increasingly vulnerable to the effects of climate change in rural Zimbabwe, taking up a large share of the agricultural labor force…

BARINGO COUNTY, Kenya — Across the arid landscape of Baringo county in western Kenya, in the geologically active Great Rift Valley, the December heat is scorching. Although the Indigenous pastoralist…