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Darfur has seen more than its fair share of turmoil. Millions were forced to flee a decade of violence that killed as many as 400,000 and many people remain in refugee camps today. On top of this, the climate crisis is playing out in a very real way in the Sahel as the Sahara desert […]
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Farmers in the Eastern U.S. are increasingly turning to irrigation systems to ensure the predictability of their harvests — in Georgia irrigated farmland has increased fifteen-fold from 1960 to 2015, according to government records, and crop yields have soared. But so have water disputes in the once water-rich states of the Southeast.
Why This Matters: Eastern states are not ready for the coming water shortages — their laws and policies were written with water abundance in mind.
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While California’s 7-year drought was declared over, a rain-less October along with a NOAA report warning of a dry winter are fueling fears that the state’s water woes will be back once again.
As If Drought Wasn’t Enough: A new study from the journal Nature Geoscience predicts that as a result of climate change, at the end of the century plants could consume substantially more water, leaving less for people.
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A new study from the Army War College found that the “Army is precipitously close to mission failure concerning hydration of the force in a contested arid environment” and needs to “reinvest aggressively in technologies both in-house and commercial off the shelf in the next 5-10 years to keep pace with rising global temperatures, especially those arid areas in or poised for conflict.”
Why This Matters: This is not just a problem for years in the future — the military is already experiencing it today. As we reported earlier this month, at a U.S. Air Force Base in Qatar, on hot days, servicemembers can only work for 10 minutes of each hour and they must drink 2 bottles of water during the same hour. And NBC News and Inside Climate News reported last summer that an increasing number of service members are suffering from heat-related illnesses.
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Although the hottest story in the media right now is impeachment it’s important not to forget that a worsening drought is affecting Southern states from Texas to Georgia. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has extended a drought disaster declaration to numerous counties in the state due to significantly low rainfall and prolonged dry conditions that continue […]
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CBS News and CNN are reporting that because of a major drought in Zimbabwe that occurred for months, more than 2 million residents of Zimbabwe’s capital and surrounding towns were without tap water on Tuesday because city officials had to shut down the city’s main treatment plant — they do not have the money to […]
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According to a newly released report from the World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, a quarter of the world’s population across 17 countries are living in regions of extremely high water stress. The reasons behind the water crises go deeper than previously thought as new WRI hydrological models found that water withdrawals globally have more […]
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Ask just about any Californian and they will tell you that 2018’s massive wildfires are still fresh in their memory just as the 2019 fire season has officially arrived. Last week the National Interagency Fire Center put Californians on notice that they should expect another active fire season this year. The center said a heavy […]
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A bipartisan group of lawmakers worked quickly yesterday to provide Congressional approval for a drought plan to address the shrinking supply of water from the Colorado River, which provides 40 million people in the West with drinking water, power and irrigation for crops.
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If it felt to you like the rain never ended this winter, you are correct! According to NOAA, due to “a steady march of snow and rain storms across the country between December 2018 and the end of February 2019 … the contiguous U.S. marked its wettest winter on record.” How wet was it? By […]
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Colorado has experienced eight avalanches so far this winter killing 22 people, and another major blizzard is walloping the state today. Coloradoan.com reports that, according to Colorado’s Avalanche Information Center Director Ethan Greene, this year a “perfect storm” of events have created unprecedented avalanche conditions with all the critical factors that result in avalanches coming together at the same time.
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California’s exceptionally wet winter has made headlines for flooding and precipitation records yet now it’s being reported that heavy rains have nearly wiped out the state’s 5 years of drought and the trend is expected to continue well into the spring. As the Weather Channel reported a dominant weather pattern featuring a southward dip in […]
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