WMO develops Drought Monitoring System
More frequent and severe droughts caused by climate change are a challenge to ensuring food security around the globe. To help countries cope with this hazard, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is developing a monitoring system that can provide early warning of drought, determine its severity, and deliver that information to farmers in a timely manner. Donn Bobb found out more from Manava Sivakumar, director of climate prediction and adaptation at WMO, who is attending the climate conference in Copenhagen.
Manava Sivakumar says the IPCC assessment report shows very clearly that climate change is going to result in increasing frequency and magnitude of drought. He says the evidence has been very clear in the past 5 to 6 years
that in many semi-arid regions of the world there is an increasing frequency of drought.
Manava Sivakumar said 82% of the arable land in the world is rain-fed. Only 19% is irrigated and in the irrigated areas droughts do not carry an impact because irrigation takes care of the shortfall in rainfall. But in the rest of the world, any shortfall in rainfall leads to an impact on food production, because of the impact of drought on the rain-fed crop production.
He said currently in 2009, Kenya is going through a very serious drought. In the pastoral parts of Kenya, they have shown that what used to be a drought once in 10 years is now drought every 2 to 3 years, so as a result, many of the nomads that have been depending upon the kind of livelihood that they have been practicing for more than thousand years is now threatened, because of this increasing frequency of droughts, they do not have any fodder for their livestock, many of the livestock are perishing.
So most of these Nomads are really asking how they are going to live in this changing scenario. He said in China, there's a shortfall in northern parts of China that really impacted the wheat production this year. He continued that India went through some very serious drought as well. Some parts of India recovered in the latter part of the rainy season but there were parts of India that were affected.
Manava Sivakumar said the solution is that we must have an effective drought preparedness plan. One of the important aspects is the drought monitoring systesm. He said we must have very good networks in place to monitor droughts and that's the reason why they are recommending this standardized precipitation index that will enable them to have a stronger monitoring system in place that will enable the Organixation to give better early warnings about droughts.