October 15, 2020.
TAD News Desk, New Delhi: The threat that the climate change over two decades poses now is reflected in the United Nations office for disaster risk reduction (UNDRR’s) report, which stated –
“Shifting rainfall patterns and greater variability in precipitation poses a risk to 70 per cent of global agriculture that is rainfed and the 1.3 billion people dependent on degrading agricultural land.”
Rainfed agriculture denotes the farming that is dependent on rainfalls, which plays a pivotal role in global production and the vast majority of poor farmers are dependent on it.
More than 95 per cent of agricultural land in sub-Saharan Africa, 90 per cent in Latin America, 75 per cent in West Asia and South Africa, 60 per cent in South Asia, and 65 per cent in East Asia depend only on rainfall.
India’s forty per cent of the food production is done on the 51 per cent of the agricultural land which is rain-fed, as per the union ministry of agriculture and farmer’s welfare.
UNDRR report stated that between 2000-2019, around 0.51 million people were killed, and 3.9 billion people were affected by disasters.
The climate-related disasters had doubled from 3,656 in 1980-1999 to 6,681 in 2000-2019. India and China had 2.8 billion people affected by the disaster, constituting 70 per cent of the global population involved in the years 2000-2019. Disasters are affecting 200 million people every year for the last two decades.
Debarati Guha – Sapir said, “If this level of growth in extreme weather events continues over the next 20 years, the future of humankind looks very bleak indeed.” He is the professor of epidemiology of disasters at the University of Louvain, Belgium, and had partnered with UNDRR’s report.
Drought affected 1.4 billion people in the last two decades, while it occurs in only 5 per cent of times of other disasters. The droughts affect mostly agricultural produce dependents on rainfed farming.
Droughts most hit Africa; a total of 40 per cent of global droughts happened there in the last two decades. The report stated, “Droughts take a huge human toll in terms of hunger, poverty and the perpetuation of under-development.”
Droughts carry a range of problems with them – agricultural failures, diseases, loss of livestock, water shortages – and few droughts live on for years, leading to the displacement of populous and economic slowdown impacts for the long term.
Source: Prevention Web
