Weather events like the prolonged drought in Eastern Africa are getting worse because of climate change primarily from fossil fuel burning, according to an international collaboration between climate scientists.
Large parts of the region have suffered extended dry conditions with only short, intense rainfall often leading to flash floods since Oct. 2020.
"Climate change has made events like the current drought much stronger and more likely; a conservative estimate is that such droughts have become about 100 times more likely," the World Weather Attribution initiative between scientists in Europe, the U.S. and India said on Thursday.
British and Dutch climate scientists founded WWA in 2014 to examine how much climate change fuels extreme weather or climate-related events.
It includes scientists from institutions in France, India, the Netherlands, Switzerland, United States and United Kingdom, along with climate impact specialists at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center.
For this study led by Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London who heads the collaboration, scientists teamed up from Germany, Kenya, Mozambique, the Netherlands, South Africa, the U.S., and U.K.
They assessed how human-induced climate change altered the likelihood and intensity of low rainfall that led to drought, and the increase in climate change-caused evaporation that exacerbated the drought's severity.
Curious about the methods used in WWA studies? This podcast by @ConversationEDU is a must-listen. 🎧⚡
— World Weather Attribution (@WWAttribution) April 14, 2023
Featuring @FrediOtto, the episode brilliantly breaks down each step of a rapid attribution study, using our 2019 France heatwave as a case study.https://t.co/aSGOt99ANP
If only: a 1.2° cooler world
Some 18 million people are displaced in the Greater Horn of Africa region – which includes Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda – due to the worst drought in at least 40 years.
At least 6 million people are at the highest levels of hunger – emergency and catastrophic – and desperately need help, the U.N. health agency says.
The below-average "short rains" during the Oct.-Dec. 2022 season was the fifth consecutive failed season since 2020, including the below-average March-May “long rains” in 2021 and 2022.
"Despite some reported rains in parts of Kenya by the end of March 2023, the drought conditions are not likely to recover quickly enough to see improvements in food security before mid-2023," they said.
Their study looked at rainfall, temperatures and evaporation rates from soil and plants to determine how much climate change influenced the low rainfall, or meteorological drought, and the scarcity of water available for plants, or agricultural drought.
The low rainfall and high evaporation rates "would not have led to drought at all in a 1.2° Celsius cooler world," they concluded. "This change in drought severity is primarily due to the strong increase in evaporative demand caused by higher temperatures."
