Near 40-year drought trend during 1981-2019 earth warming and food security

Abstract

Following the 2014 report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Earth surface has been warming up since the mid-18th century. From the late 1970s, Earth warmed up intensively, leading to unusual environmental, economic and social events. An intensive 19th century’s, Earth warming has speeded up ice melting and sea level rise, increased water shortage and drought intensity. Expected drought intensification and expansion would reduce crop production, deteriorating food security and intensifying poor population’s hunger. Since climate warming is continuing, we estimate long-term interaction between global warming and high-resolution drought tendencies and its consequences for global and regional food security. This paper develops and investigates satellite-derived 38-year high-resolution drought data sets and evaluate their trends, during 1981-2018. Drought was estimated using satellite-based Vegetation Health (VH) method. The results indicated that for the entire globe, hemispheres and the main grain-producing countries (China, USA and India) drought has not intensified and expanded during 38-year, while the global temperature anomaly has strongly increased. Since drought has not intensified and expanded during strong global warming, food security in the next few years is likely to remain at the level of the most recent decade.