[Deserted village now visible as water level has dropped]
[Dry reservoir bed]
Professor Justin Sheffield (interview): “We normally think about droughts as slowly evolving events that take a few months to start and often last for several months or even seasons. But a newer concept that’s been around for maybe a decade or so is flash droughts, which start much more rapidly, and that’s why they have perhaps bigger impacts, at least in the short term. And they evolve rapidly because there are sudden deficits in rainfall and precipitation, but also they’re often accompanied by high temperatures that rapidly deplete the moisture in the soil through evapotranspiration.”
[Drought-affected Cconchaccota village in the Apurimac region in the Peruvian Andes]
Professor Sheffield (interview): “What we did in the study is we looked at how flash droughts have changed globally over the last 60 years and found that they’ve been increasing in most places. And we’re starting to see a transition between flash droughts that evolve rapidly and the usual kind of slower onset drought. So there’s this transition happening in many places, including in Europe. And we also looked into the future to see what the climate models were saying about how this would pan out in the future and we found that globally we would see a transition to flash droughts just about everywhere.”
[Dry riverbed and dead fish]
Professor Sheffield (interview): “We’re seeing it everywhere, but we tend to see it more in those kind of tropical wet tropics and semi-arid lands. But we also see in the mid-latitudes, where essentially most of Europe sits, and across other places in the world. So there are a few hotspots, as I mentioned, in Europe where we don’t necessarily get that many flash droughts, but they’re becoming much more common. So the changes in terms of the number of flash droughts are occurring much more rapidly in places like Europe.”
[Rhine river and its bank, river level lower than usual due to drought]
Dr. Peili Wu (interview): “If a drought takes three months to develop, or something, it’s a slow process, so the crops can probably build up some sort of resistance, or prepare to survive, and also the same for society, but if it comes too quick, too unexpectedly fast, then the ecosystem, the crops, and the society, will not have time, it will struggle to respond, or to adapt to the new conditions.”
[Aerial shots of dry farmlands]
Dr. Peili Wu (interview): “The impact is not something people can ignore, even for rich countries from Europe for example, because (inaudible) droughts can sometimes have large and vast impact on lots of aspects and the droughts that we see in the last years, in the UK for example, actually there’s some impacts that caught people by surprise, they were fires, crop damages. So even for a country like the UK, events like that you can see a strong impact and severe damages occur.”
[Aerial shots of Ccochaccota village and dried lagoon]
This script was provided by The Associated Press.