GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) — United Nations agencies want to strengthen national drought policies after warnings that climate change would increase their frequency and severity.
Droughts cause more deaths and displacement than floods or earthquakes, making them the world’s most destructive natural hazard, says the Food and Agriculture Organization, one of the groups taking part.
“We must boost national capacity to cope before droughts occur,” FAO deputy director-general Ann Tutwiler told five days of talks on drought in Geneva attended by scientists, politicians and development agencies.
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“Unless we shift towards such policies, we face the prospect of repeated humanitarian catastrophes and the repeated threat of drought to global food security.”
In 2012, the United States experienced the worst drought since the 1930s dustbowl, pushing grain prices to record highs. Droughts have also affected the Horn of Africa and the Sahel region in the past few years, as well as China, Russia and southeastern Europe.
UN secretary-general Ban Kid-moon said in December that extreme weather was the “new normal,” adding that drought had decimated essential crops from the United States to India and Ukraine to Brazil.
“No one is immune to climate change: rich or poor. It is an existential challenge for the whole human race: our way of life, our plans for the future,” he said at the time.
However, governments have often been slow to act on drought because, unlike other natural disasters, they tend to develop more gradually and often do not generate an instant media buzz.
“As opposed to other natural disasters, it’s a slow creeping phenomenon,” said Mannava Sivakumar, a director for the World Meteorological Organization’s climate prediction and adaptation division who assisted with the talks.
“If people say, ‘let’s wait and see what happens,’ before you realize it, you see crops dying, orchards dying and millions of dollars in damage,” he said.
The four UN bodies that launched the National Drought Management Policies Initiative were the FAO, the WMO, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and the UN Water Decade Programme on Capacity Development.
The project aims to develop early warning systems, following the example of the U.S. National Integrated Drought Information System, and mitigation measures that might include helping farmers change their planting schedule to adapt to water shortages.
They said they would proceed through four regional workshops in Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean throughout 2013.
The conference also urged governments to develop stronger regional and global co-operation to improve observation systems and put in place national emergency relief measures.
