Climate change leads to an expansion of global drought-sensitive area

Abstract

Droughts will occur more extensively and frequently worldwide, where the increase in drought-sensitive area will further threaten the stability of global ecosystems. However, the distribution and changes of the drought-sensitive area remain unclear. Here we found the distribution and changes of the drought-sensitive area, humid type partition, and arid type partition of the propagation of meteorological drought to agricultural drought during the last 40 years via drought propagation analysis. We show that, globally, drought-sensitive area have increased significantly by 120 × 104 km2, an area equivalent to The Republic of South Africa (122 × 104 km2), while the humid type partition has decreased significantly by 384 × 104 km2 which is larger than that of India (329 × 104 km2). It indicates that the risk of drought is increasing significantly globally. Asia and South America are facing the most critical situation among the continents. Notably, the increase of drought-sensitive area and the loss of humid type partition were concentrated in their transition areas, and 6.44 % of humid type partition are changing into drought-sensitive area globally. In these transformation areas, the largest area is forested and agricultural land, which will seriously threaten the stability of the global ecosystem and food security.