downtoearth-subscribe

Drought

  • Drought, Food Prices Threaten Millions Of Somalis-UN

    Soaring food prices, a devalued currency and drought mean millions of people in Somalia cannot feed themselves, the United Nations said on Monday. And the crisis will get much worse if April-June rains fail or are well below average, the Food and Agriculture Organisation said. Somalia, a country of nine million people, already imports more than half its grain needs. Soaring commodity prices and a weakening currency have made those staples 375 percent more expensive than a year ago, the FAO said in a statement.

  • Famine Looms as Wars Rend Horn of Africa

    The police in Somalia stood near the corpses of lambs in Dagaari. Drought is killing livestock and destroying livelihoods. She cannot afford rice or wheat or powdered milk anymore. At the same time, a drought has decimated her family's herd of goats, turning their sole livelihood into a pile of bleached bones and papery skin. The result is that Ms. Safia, a 25-year-old mother of five, has not eaten in a week. Her 1-year-old son is starving too, an adorable, listless boy who doesn't even respond to a pinch.

  • No water, weddings get cancelled

    For those who get running water at the turn of a knob in their houses, this may sound somewhat outlandish, even bizarre. Hundreds of young men are being forced to lead a bachelor's life and hundreds of young girls prefer being "sold" outside the state rather than marry in their own state and the villain in this situation is water. Marriages are being cancelled, postponed and called-off at the last minute in the Bundelkhand region due to paucity of water.

  • Bundelkhand package calls for debt relief

    The Union Agriculture Ministry has worked out a package for revival of the farm sector in the drought-hit Bundelkhand region in Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh on the lines of the Rehabilitation Package for Vidarbha and other drought-prone districts where farmers' suicides were high. Among other measures for relief, the Bundelkhand package suggests a debt relief for farmers in the region. It calls for contingency cropping, diversification and cross-breeding for local cattle that had lost fertility due to lack of minerals and green fodder.

  • Drought forces out Spain's underwater church

    Barcelona: Perhaps the most striking image of Spain's drought, so severe it has forced Barcelona to ship in water, has been that of the underwater church which emerged from a drying dam. For most of the past four decades, all that has been visible of the village of Sant Roma has been the belltower of its stone church, peeping above the water beside forested hills from a valley flooded in the 1960s to provide water for the Catalonia region.

  • Firms seek patents on climate-ready' GM crops

    A handful of the world's largest agricultural biotechnology companies are seeking hundreds of patents on gene-altered crops designed to withstand drought and other environmental stresses, part of a race for dominance in the potentially lucrative market for crops that can handle global warming, according to a report being released Tuesday.

  • Algae bloom worsens drought

    A prolonged drought in China's Liaoning province has left 850,000 people short of drinking water and affected spring farming in many areas. According to the provincial drought relief

  • Australia Budget - Great Barrier Reef In Frame In Climate Fight

    Australia will spend A$3.8 billion ($3.5 billion) to fight climate change, including A$200 million to rescue the Great Barrier Reef, as part of a four-year plan outlined in the government's budget on Tuesday. More than A$1 billion would be spent to improve renewable technologies like solar, wind and geothermal energy over six years, as well as clean-up heavy-polluting coal power, centre-left Labour said in its first budget since it last held power in 1995.

  • Australia facing further drought

    The New South Wales government warned yesterday that Australia's main eastern state was facing another "horror autumn" of drought to already devastated farmlands. The government said the area of the state officially in drought had increased to 48.4 per cent from 42.9 per cent a month earlier as farmers wait for rain in order to plant wheat and other winter crops. "These figures represent a real fear that our winter crop may again be savaged by this merciless drought," Ian Macdonald, primary industries minister, said.

  • Clean Air Could Kill The Amazon, Researchers Say

    Cleaner air due to reduced coal burning could help destroy the Amazon this century, according to a finding published on Wednesday that highlights the complex challenges of global climate change. The study in the journal Nature identified a link between reduced sulphur dioxide emissions from coal burning and increased sea surface temperatures in the tropical North Atlantic that boosts the drought risk in the Amazon rainforest. With the rainforest already threatened by development, higher global temperatures could tip the balance, they said.

  1. 1
  2. ...
  3. 138
  4. 139
  5. 140
  6. 141
  7. 142
  8. ...
  9. 176