Photo: Marion on PixabayThe American West is experiencing its worst and longest drought since 800 AD, roughly the time of Charlemagne, according to the journal Nature Climate Change. The last multi-decade drought in America occurred in the 1500s, but it was not as devastating
The ongoing drought in the western part of the North American continent has caused the level of lakes, reservoirs and rivers in California to drop to record low levels, which has caused more wildfires, according to scientists. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change it relied on data obtained through tree rings and wooden beams preserved at Native American archaeological sites. Images of dried-up lakes, wildfire-ravaged landscapes, snow-covered communities and communities without water reveal the consequences of historic drought.
The western United States has experienced drought for much of the past two decades, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. Last year, there was a water shortage on the Colorado River, one of the largest sources of life in the western United States, which affected about 40 million Americans. The world has already warmed by about 1,2 degrees Celsius since the industrial era began, and the temperature will continue to rise unless governments around the world work to drastically reduce emissions, comments the BBC.
Arizona seeks salvation in the rain
In the midst of a campaign by Brad Lancaster, a rainwater harvesting and water management expert in Tucson, Arizona, he has introduced several measures to fully utilize rainwater as a type of resource. In 2008, a decree was passed that new commercial buildings irrigate half of the land using collected rainwater. In 2013, a "Green Streets Policy" was adopted that mandates all publicly funded road projects to capture the first half inch (1,3 cm) of rain during rainfall events. And with a more recent initiative, "Green Rainwater Infrastructure," in 2020, Tucson began charging residents a small fee on their water bills to raise about $3 million annually to support public rainwater harvesting projects, such as the city's "Initiative for a million trees".
Lancaster, who now runs a permaculture consulting firm that advises Tucson and clients around the world, estimates that in a typical year, Tucson receives far more rain than all of its citizens spend in municipal water. "It's crazy that we're still spending so much money to fetch substandard water from 480 miles away, when we have this huge amount of water coming for free from the sky that we can use as a primary source," reports the BBC.
Randolph, of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy at the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, doesn't believe rainwater harvesting alone can provide water to the extent that a reservoir system does. She says that's not an option for every city experiencing water shortages. But as the climate gets warmer and demand grows, she thinks the rain "harvest" will become more frequent.
"Hunger Stone" in Europe
As reported by N1, due to the biggest drought in Europe in the last five centuries, the riverbeds are increasingly empty, and ship transport is difficult. Such a drastic one-hundred-year minimum of river water levels brought great damage. Agroeconomic analyst Žarko Galetin says that digging the Danube bed as a solution sounds incredible, but that in the future we will have to turn to alternative modes of transport, such as truck or rail transport.
The Rhine-Danube corridor with its capillary roads is the pivot of transport in Europe, and it is currently not functioning. There are also problems in the lower reaches of the Danube, so, Galetin explains, barges transporting Serbian goods to the Romanian port of Constanta, even with a smaller load, got stuck somewhere in Bulgaria. The catastrophic hydrological situation affects energy production, so Serbian hydropower plants are producing a third less electricity than usual. In the last ten years, as many as seven have been dry, and each time the topic of irrigation is raised, while the results are absent.
"Irrigation is a serious problem, it should be approached professionally and seriously." It's not that simple, when all the water resources are balanced, you can't stick a stick next to every field and let the water leak," said Galetin and pointed out that Serbia has the problem of too small areas under irrigation systems.
As "Vreme" wrote in the text this August A stone of hunger, anger and rage, a centuries-old warning message from 1616 surfaced in the bed of the Elbe River, carved into a stone known as the "Hungersteine" or "Hunger Stone", which reads: "If you see me, cry". The "Stones of Hunger" is actually a "hydrological landmark", which emerges only when the water level is very low, with a brief record of the consequences of a great drought: bad harvest, starvation of poor people.
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