Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
impact of climate change on agriculture, shows
that productivity over a large proportion of the
world's drylands, using the outputs of
most
general
circulation models, is likely to decline in the first
part of the next century (Table 13.4).
Far greater prominence (at least in the media,
and therefore among people at large and policy
makers) has been given to the impacts of droughts
on drylands and their inhabitants. The first
drought to stir the imagination of the world's
scientists and policy makers was the Sahelian
drought of the 1970s; the first that really nagged at
the global conscience was the Ethiopian drought
and famine of the 1980s. In reality, droughts are
part of the normal (high) variability of dryland
climates, and they are a recurrent feature of the
instrumental record as well as in the archaeological
and palaeoenvironmental records.
Acknowledgement of the importance of droughts
and their links to desertification has arisen from
the increased coverage of droughts by the global
media as well as from the impact that they have
had on larger numbers of people. A pertinent
question to ask is whether droughts have greater
