Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.
To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser.
2022, New Formations
AI
This editorial introduces a special issue of New Formations exploring the intersections of climate change, extinction, and cultural narratives. It highlights the unprecedented environmental conditions in South West France during summer 2022, setting the stage for discussions on how media and popular culture reflect and influence perceptions of extinction and climate emergency. Contributions analyze the implications of survival narratives in culture and the critical need for collective action against climate change, emphasizing the failures of mainstream discourse in addressing the urgency of the climate crisis.
2016
Drought has been a threat to human existence throughout history. Today, as in the past, drought alters the course of civilizations. It is not merely a physical phenomenon, but the result of an interplay between a natural event (precipitation deficiencies due to natural climatic variability on varying timescales) and the demand placed on water supply by human-use systems. Extended periods of drought have resulted in significant economic, environmental, and social impacts, including food supply disruptions, famine, massive soil erosion, migrations of people, and wars. Human activities often exacerbate the impacts of drought (e.g., the Dust Bowl in the Great Plains, the Sahelian drought of the early 1970s). This trend appears to be accelerating because of the increasing demand being placed on local and regional water resources as a result of the earth's rapidly expanding population. Recent droughts in developing and developed countries and the concomitant impacts and personal hardships that resulted have underscored the vulnerability of all societies to this natural hazard. It is difficult to determine whether it is the frequency of drought that is increasing, or simply societal vulnerability to it.
Atmosphere, 2022
Droughts have been identified as an environmental hazard by environmentalists, ecologists, hydrologists, meteorologists, geologists, and agricultural experts. Droughts are characterised by a decrease in precipitation over a lengthy period, such as a season or a year, and can occur in virtually all climatic zones, including both high and low rainfall locations. This study reviewed drought-related impacts on the environment and other components particularly, in South Africa. Several attempts have been made using innovative technology such as earth observation and climate information as recorded in studies. Findings show that the country is naturally water deficient, which adds to the climate fluctuation with the average annual rainfall in South Africa being far below the global average of 860 mm per year. Drought in South Africa’s Western Cape Province, for example, has resulted in employment losses in the province’s agriculture sector. According to the third quarterly labor force sur...
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Books in Soils, Plants, and the Environment, 2005
Nature Geoscience, 2016
This document is the author's final manuscript version of the journal article, incorporating any revisions agreed during the peer review process. There may be differences between this and the publisher's version. You are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from this article.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2017
DECEMBER 2017 AMERICAN METEOROLOGICAL SOCIETY | THE RISING RISK OF DROUGHT. Droughts of the twenty-first century are characterized by hotter temperatures, longer duration, and greater spatial extent, and are increasingly exacerbated by human demands for water. This situation increases the vulnerability of ecosystems to drought, including a rise in drought-driven tree mortality globally (Allen et al. 2015) and anticipated ecosystem transformations from one state to another-for example, forest to a shrubland (Jiang et al. 2013). When a drought drives changes within ecosystems, there can be a ripple effect through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services (Millar and Stephenson 2015). For example, the "Millennium Drought" (2002-10) in Australia caused unanticipated losses to key services provided by hydrological ecosystems in the Murray-Darling basin-including air quality regulation, waste treatment, erosion prevention, and recreation. The costs of these losses exceeded AUD $800 million, as resources were spent to replace these services and adapt to new drought-impacted ecosystems (Banerjee et al. 2013). Despite the high costs to both nature and people, current drought research, management, and policy perspectives often fail to evaluate how drought affects ecosystems and the "natural capital" they provide to human communities. Integrating these human and natural dimensions of drought is an essential step toward addressing the rising risk of drought in the twenty-first century. Part of the problem is that existing drought definitions describing meteorological drought impacts (agricultural, hydrological, and socioeconomic) view drought through a human-centric lens and do not fully address the ecological dimensions of drought.
2014
Associated with the New Wave science fiction for writing mostly post-apocalyptic dystopias, James Graham Ballard (1930-2009) is known as a fierce critic of capitalism and consumerism in the face of industrial developments. In his fiction, he suggests what kinds of chaos await humankind in the face of the changes in nonhuman environment engendered by pollution and technology. In writing catastrophic novels in which the world is devastated by drought, flood, wind or crystallisation, Ballard endeavours to reveal the effects of human activities on the nonhuman and those of natural disasters on mankind. In his dystopian novel The Drought (1965), which was formerly published with the title The Burning World (1964), Ballard portrays a bleak world threatened by dramatic climate changes because of the chemicals and industrial wastes globally dumped into rivers and seas, resulting in the obstruction of evaporation and rainfall due to a sort of plastic layer covered on oceans. This paper aims to explore The Drought in terms of ecological dystopia regarding the relationship between nature and humankind. To this end, ecocritical theory will be employed to expose how humanity affects and is affected by nature during a ten-year drought in Larchmont, a lakeside town on the eastern coast of America.
Regional Environmental Change, 2022
This topical collection explores past drought events and their human dimensions, including both short-term direct and indirect impacts and long-term transformations. It comprises nine articles covering seven countries or regions across three continents: in both physical and written records; in fields of archeology, history, hydrology, and geography; and in the ancient, medieval, and modern eras. Together, these papers provide a representative view of emerging interdisciplinary research on historical droughts.
2016
In the current human-modified world, or Anthropocene, the state of water stores and fluxes has become dependent on human as well as natural processes. Water deficits (or droughts) are the result of a complex interaction between meteorological anomalies, land surface processes, and human inflows, outflows, and storage changes. Our current inability to adequately analyse and manage drought in many places points to gaps in our understanding and to inadequate data and tools. The Anthropocene requires a new framework for drought definitions and research. Drought definitions need to be revisited to explicitly include human processes driving and modifying soil moisture drought and hydrological drought development. We give recommendations for robust drought definitions to clarify timescales of drought and prevent confusion with related terms such as water scarcity and overexploitation. Additionally, our understanding and analysis of drought need to move from single driver to multiple driver...
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences Discussions, 2016
In the current human-modified world, or "Anthropocene", the state of water stores and fluxes has become dependent on human as well as natural processes. Water deficits (or droughts) are the result of a complex interaction between meteorological anomalies, land surface processes, and human inflows, outflows and storage changes. Our current inability to adequately analyse and manage drought in many places points to gaps in our understanding and to inadequate data and tools. The Anthropocene requires a new framework for drought definitions and research. Drought definitions need to be revisited to explicitly include human processes driving and modifying soil moisture drought and hydrological drought development. We give recommendations for robust drought definitions to clarify timescales of drought and prevent confusion with related terms such as water scarcity and overexploitation. Additionally, our understanding and analysis of drought need to move from single driver to mult...
Drought Assessment, Management, and Planning: Theory and Case Studies, 1993
Climate of the Past Discussions
The Czech Lands are particularly rich in documentary sources that help elucidate droughts in the pre-instrumental period (12th-18th centuries), together with descriptions of human responses to 15 them. Although droughts appear less frequently before AD 1501, the documentary evidence has enabled the creation of series of seasonal and summer half-year drought indices (SPI, SPEI and Zindex) for the Czech Lands for the 1501-2017 period. Based on calculation of return period for series of drought indices, extreme droughts were selected for inclusion herein if all three indices indicated a return period of ≥20 years. For further analysis, only those from the pre-instrumental period (before 20 AD 1804) were used. The extreme droughts selected are characterised by significantly lower values of drought indices, higher temperatures and lower precipitation totals compared to other years. The sealevel pressure patterns typically associated with extreme droughts include significantly higher pressure over Europe and significantly lower pressure over parts of the Atlantic Ocean. Extreme droughts with a return period ≥50 years are described in detail on the basis of Czech documentary evidence. A number 25 of selected extreme droughts are reflected in other central European reconstructions derived from documentary data or tree-rings. Impacts on social life and responses to extreme droughts are summarised; analysis of fluctuations in grain prices with respect to drought receives particular attention. Finally, extreme droughts from the pre-instrumental and instrumental periods are discussed. 30 1 Introduction Droughts and floods constitute two extreme aspects of the water cycle. However, while floods are typified by sudden onset, loss of human lives and immediate material damage, the onset of droughts is much slower, without direct loss of human lives and result more a chronologically extended range of impacts, especially on agriculture (agricultural drought), water resources (hydrological and 35 underground water droughts), and usually with more delay in their broader socioeconomic consequences (socio-economic droughts). The origin of droughts lies in deficit of precipitation totals compared to climatological norms in a given area (meteorological drought), but it must be noted that this may exacerbated by other meteorological factors, even by anthropogenic activities (Van Loon et al., 2016). 40 Several extreme drought events with significant human impacts and consequences are known worldwide from the more recent instrumental period occurring, for example, in
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.