Cause And Effects Of Drought

Women’s Rugby League in Australia constantly growing, and the New South Wales Rugby League took notice after the NSW team broke a 17-year-drought against Queensland earlier in the year, by setting a five year pathway plan to increase participation levels and equality in sport.

Drought is a deficiency in precipitation over an extended period of time. They are very unpredictable as some are more extreme, some last for months and some persist for years including some severe examples in Australia, which lasted over 10 years. These long periods with water shortages can have an adverse impact on the environment, including vegetation, animals and people. Further drought can occur in virtually all climate zones; whether in the blazing dessert of Australia or the wet, tropical Indonesian coast. Finally due to the wide spread difference in climates around the world a drought can be very different. For example what is conceived a drought in Bali (6 days without water) would defiantly not be a drought in Libya (annual

There are several reasons that contribute to California’s drought. Bottled water is a main issue for the nation. We consume “more than 10 billion gallons of bottled water per year,’’ according to The Wrong Way to Think about California Water. People should choose tap water over bottled water. Surprisingly, tap water is regulated better than bottled water is. Another topic that people sometimes bring up to the subject of California’s drought is, agriculture. In The Wrong Way to Think about California Water it says, “Perhaps the best-known statistic about the state’s nut crop is that it takes one gallon of water to grow a single almond.” Although almond trees use a large amount of water, they aren't the reason why we are in a drought. Many

A drought is a natural hazard that occurs from a prolonged period of below average precipitation and primarily consists of abnormally dry conditions, which decreases the supply of water to support the continuing needs of the environment, agriculture, and society. Australia, being the driest inhabited continent in the world, is immensely prone to droughts due to an array of geographical factors. A predominant cause of droughts in Australia is El Niño. An El Niño occurs when sea surface temperatures exceeds substantially warmer than average which causes a shift in atmospheric circulation. As a result, the consequence of El Niño is reduced rainfall, warmer waters and higher temperatures. This has a significant effect on the occurrence of droughts

When there is a drought, there is less water available for growing crops, farming animals, industry and our cities. Droughts also impact the environment

In a severe state of drought, it could even cause hunger, dehydration, malnutrition, wildfires, and even war.

Cytokines and Gibberellins are known as two of the five major plant phytohormones acknowledged to contain a major impact on plant growth. They regulate plant growth and respond to environmental stress conditions. Cytokines hormone plays a role in the promoting of shoot initiation, the development of plant organs, and plant cell differentiation. The roles of gibberellins include stimulation of stem elongation, germination, seed dormancy, and the maturation of fruit and flowers. The phytohormones are customized, delivery or converted, which gives plants the ability to grown and respond against stress environments. Gibberellins have recently been discovered to be one of the main hormones that respond against abiotic stress such as wind and drought. Low levels of gibberellins have controlled plant growth restriction. This allowed plants to use their resources at a more conservative level in times of cold weather and salinity increase. On the other hand, increasing gibberellins levels allows plant to respond to plant growth allowing it to escape shady conditions and reach light. However, despite the acknowledgements of those two plant hormones in relation to regulation of plant growth, environmental stress will negatively impact the

Earth atmospheric CO2 concentration ([CO2]) has increased by more than 35% since 1750, is the highest in the past 400,000 years and is currently increasing by about 2 parts per million each year (Fig. 1). Because of contributions from human activity, [CO2] is expected to continue to rise in the foreseeable future and to double sometime during this century if fossil fuels burning continues. As a consequence, air temperature is predicted to rise 2 to 5˚C by 2100 (IPCC, 2014). Concomitant to the rise in [CO2], some ecosystems will face challenges in the next few decades as plants experience warmer temperatures, higher evaporative demand, and widespread changes in drought lengths and severity (Diffenbaugh et al. 2015). To produce healthy crops and forests under changing climate conditions, it is imperative to determine whether elevated [CO2] (CO2e) affects cell formation but even more the physiological traits conferring drought-tolerance.

Heat waves everywhere are projected to become more intense and increase in duration. Summer temperatures are predicted to continue to rise, eventually leading to a greater reduction of soil moisture, which then causes the exacerbation of heat waves and a widespread number of droughts (“Global Climate Change: Effects”). Droughts not only have adverse effects on livestock and crops, but droughts also affect water levels on rivers of commerce, such as the Mississippi, which hinders the transportation of goods. Droughts lead to concerns being raised regarding the reliability of electricity production from power plants that require “cooling water to maintain safe operations”, hydroelectric power may also become hard to acquire or simply unavailable during droughts (“Drought and Climate Change”). In countries that are already facing issues of food insecurity, cost spikes associated with a lower availability and abundance of crops could potentially lead to migration, famine, or social unrest.

These findings are significant in determining the difference in drought survival potential between the pinon pines and the junipers even though they are from the same ecosystem. The pinons were found to be isohydric meaning that they regulate transpiration to maintain mid- day leaf water potential whereas the junipers were found to be anisohydric meaning that they allow water potential in leaves to decrease during water potential decrease. I think it is interesting that the isohydric method seems to make sense on paper in terms of surviving a drought- to regulate transpiration but instead, the anisohydric method proved to be more reliable, perhaps to allow the leaf to transpire as much as possible. It was found that the pinon and juniper were very different in terms of drought tolerance characteristics including cavitation. The junipers had a smaller rate of cavitation than the pinons and the junipers also had a better ability to intercept rain through foliar absorption which I found interesting because the foliage on both plants doesn’t differ much. The ultimate conclusion to the reason behind the pinon pine mortality was that the cavitation rate was larger with the pinons and so they closed their stomate during drought stress to avoid cavitation but ultimately they ended up starving themselves of water and carbon. Before the results are presented in the paper, it is mentioned that

Of Morocco’s 446,550 square kilometers, around 18% of the land is arable which is widely used for agriculture because of the fertile soil. The climate of Morocco is subtropical and moderate, despite interior parts of the country having harsh dessert climate with variable extremes in temperature. Natural resources in Morocco include phosphate, barite, cobalt, fluorspar and lead. Due to the country’s fertile land, agricultural products also play a key role in the economy. This includes tomatoes, mandarins/clementines/tangerines, oranges and olives. Morocco also exports consumer goods such as textiles and leather goods with reflects on an abundance of livestock such as cattle and sheep (for wool). ("Economy & Industry.”)

As discusses above, drought causes the shortage of plants and animals, which provide food for human beings. Therefore, the shortage of food causes problems for living.

There are many serious environmental problems around the world. These problems such as drought, global warming, and pollution are caused by our actions, mistakes, or just by nature. Out of the various environmental problems, drought is one of the hazard of nature that is happening throughout some parts of the world, especially in California, United States. In general, drought is a “period of dry weather” or “an extended shortage of water” (Jaworski). There are two types of drought definitions: conceptual and operational definitions. Conceptual definitions help understand the meaning of drought and its effects. The example definition would be “drought is a protracted period of deficient precipitation which causes extensive damage to crops, resulting in loss of yield”. Operational definitions help identify the drought’s beginning, end, and degree of severity (National Drought Mitigation Center). However, it is hard to define drought because its impacts vary from region to region. For instance, drought in Bali, where it is a drought when rain does not fall for six days, would not be considered a drought in Libya where the annual rainfall is less than 180mm (USGS). Just as we define drought in many ways, there are also four types of drought: meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, and socioeconomic. First, meteorological drought is defined on the basis of the degree of dryness and the duration of the dry period or precipitation. Agricultural drought links various

Over the past four years in California there has been a devastating drought affecting the agriculture of the land. Their exportation of vegetables has drastically been changed due to this lack of precipitation. While, vegetables play a dominant role is California’s agriculture. In 2014, 24 percent of California’s $33 billion in crop sales were commercial vegetables (55 percent of all U.S. vegetable sales). The differentiating factor of farms that distinguishes the effects of the drought is it’s water source used. Some farms can see devastating numbers drop, but others do not have much change because they may use more stable irrigation systems (USDA). There is a demand for more systems to be put into place to bring California’s exports of vegetables back to the high numbers and more affordable prices they once were. Many scientists as well as citizens and the government of California are looking for more ways to relieve the farmers of this drought and look towards more ways to bring water to their dry farms.

If you live in California you most likely have been affected or seen the impact of a drought. People living in different regions experience varying amounts of precipitation. These regions are also supplied with water from various sources such as streams, lakes and rivers that come from the snowpack in the mountains. This anticipated and relatively reliable source of water is used and managed for many actions, as water is vital to life. A drought occurs when less rainfall or water flow than is expected is experienced, usually over a period of time, resulting in a water shortage for some activity, group, or environmental sector.