Extreme drought area expected to double by the end of the century

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2021-01-12 03:00

Australia; International

By the end of this century, the global land area and population in extreme-to-exceptional drought could more than double, according to international research. The study looked at the water available globally in lakes and reservoirs, rivers, wetlands, canopies, snow and ice, soil and groundwater, collectively called terrestrial water storage (TWS). It found that this water is expected to decline over the next 80 years, especially in the Southern Hemisphere driven primarily by declines in Australia and South America.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Climate Change

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Michigan State University, USA

Funder: Y.P. and F.F. acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation (CAREER Award, grant no. 1752729). H.M.S. and C.-E.T. acknowledge support from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, grant no. 01LS1711F). J.L. acknowledges support from the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (grant no. XDA20060402) and the National Natural Science Foundation of Nat ure Climate Change | www.nature.com/natureclimatechange NaTurE ClimaTE CHangE Articles China (41625001 and 51711520317). N.H. acknowledges support from the ERTDF (2RF- 1802) of the ERCA, Japan. Y.W. is supported by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 EUCP project (grant no. 776613) and the JPI Climate and European Union under the ISIpedia project (grant no. 690462). W.T. acknowledges support from the Uniscientia Foundation and the ETH Zurich Foundation (Fel-45 15-1). H.K. acknowledges the Integrated Research Program for Advancing Climate Models (TOUGOU) JPMXD0717935457 from MEXT and the Grantin-Aid for Specially promoted Research 16H06291 from JSPS, Japan.

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