Climate change has influenced global drought risk for ‘more than a century’

May 3, 2019

A cow is seen on a land that used to be filled with water, at the Aculeo Lagoon in Paine, Chile January 9, 2019. Picture taken January 9, 2019. REUTERS/Rodrigo Garrido - RC1DE3027750

Once filled with water, the Aculeo Lagoon in Chile is now a dry wasteland. Image: REUTERS/Rodrigo Garrido

Daisy Dunne

Science Writer, Carbon Brief

Our Impact

The Big Picture

Explore and monitor how Climate Change is affecting economies, industries and global issues

A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

Crowdsource Innovation

Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:

Climate Change

The strength of the relationship between PDSI estimates from observational data – tree-ring reconstructions (green) and meteorological datasets (CRU, dark blue; DAI, light blue) – and a climate change “fingerprint”. On the y-axis, a number above zero indicates a positive trend, while numbers below zero indicate a negative trend. Results are shown for three time periods: 1900-49 (top), 1950-75 (middle) and 1980-2017 (bottom). On bottom chart, tree ring reconstructions are replaced with modern surface (orange) and plant root (red) soil moisture datasets. Image: Marvel et al. (2019)

Have you read?

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.