Drought

Drought is the slow hazard. There is no sudden shock as with an earthquake or a storm; instead the rains simply fail, week after week, until the rivers shrink, the soil cracks and the crops wither. A drought is a period of dry weather longer or more severe than normal, and because it builds so quietly it is easy to underestimate until a region tips into water shortage, crop failure and even famine.

In this lesson you will learn what causes droughts, from natural shifts in rainfall and pressure to the human pressures of farming and climate change, and why a drought can feed on itself in a vicious circle. You will then follow the Environmental Management chain of cause, impact and management, using the devastating 2011 East Africa drought as a named example, and weigh up the strategies, from emergency water supplies to desalination, that communities use to survive when the rains do not come.