From North America to Africa to Europe to Asia, huge swaths of the planet were parched in 2022. Here’s what drought this year looked like on four of the hardest-hit continents:
The following month, September, officials in the central Chinese province of Jiangxi declared a water supply “red alert” for the first time as Poyang Lake’s water levels fell dramatically due to drought. The freshwater lake is the country’s largest and is normally a flood outlet for the Yangtze River.
A woman waters goats from a shallow well dug into a dry riverbed at Eliye springs on the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, on Sept. 28, 2022.Parts of Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia were among the hardest hit by drought this year. Guleid Artan, director of the WMO’s climate center for East Africathat the three countries are “on the brink of an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe” because of rainfall deficits and ongoing drought.
“The impacts would include large-scale suffering and loss of life, population movements and further entrenched inequality. These impacts are already emerging,” the organizations jointly wrote. In Italy, rivers and lakes dried up over the summer. Large sections of the country’s longest river, the River Po, ran completely dry, forcing officials in July to declare a state of emergency in five northern regions.