Drought threatens not only crops but also forests. Smoke from fires increases the greenhouse effect and accelerates global warming. The pandemic did not come alone. After the 2020 coronavirus, the year promises to bring fires, floods, crop failures, and a biblical invasion of locusts to the warming planet. Natural disasters threaten famine-stricken countries and pose serious problems for Europe and the United States, warn meteorologists and international organizations.
The world’s oceans are warming faster than ever, and droughts are spreading across Europe and the Americas. The poorest countries are facing the biggest humanitarian crisis of the century, according to the United Nations. And the rich are threatened by floods, crop failures, and an extraordinary hurricane season.
In any other situation, the world would struggle to overcome a climate event. But right now, all resources are focused on fighting Covid-19. Doctors and rescuers have no free hands, and households have no extra money. Farmers, businesses, and transportation are in an artificial lockdown. And if, during the coronavirus pandemic, a destructive tornado or heavy rain with hail hits during the harvest days, the situation threatens to spin out of control. We cannot count on the help of neighbors or international organizations: the medical force majeure has affected all countries. The virus will not spare anyone, warned the IMF’s chief economist, Gita Gopinat, recently. This time, everyone is on their own.
And the problem is not just about money. Even if a country affected by a flood, drought or hurricane has the money to mitigate the effects of the natural disaster and rebuild, buying and delivering the necessary supplies is more difficult than ever. Global trade and transportation are crippled by the coronavirus. Container ships and bulk carriers are docked and airplanes are not flying.
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The authorities, frightened by the epidemic, are imposing bans on the export of medicines and food. Even the wealthiest, most generous, and open countries are closing their borders and not giving money to the common cause: the United States, for example, has cut off funding to the most relevant international organization today – the World Health Organization. The coronavirus has changed life on the planet, but it has not eliminated what until recently was changing it – global warming, which scientists blame for the increased frequency of natural disasters.
According to the world’s largest database on the Earth’s climate, the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), the planet warmed to a record high in March 2020: only once in all the time observed since 1880 has the temperature deviated more significantly from the average. This is despite the global quarantine that has brought transportation and industry to a standstill. “Air pollution has decreased due to reduced economic activity, but carbon dioxide does not disappear overnight,” says Professor Daniela Schmidt of the University of Bristol. “The effects of global warming, such as rising sea levels, will be felt for centuries. The pandemic has only limited our ability to mitigate the effects of climate change.
And the changes are obvious. The previous March record was set in 2016 against the backdrop of El Niño – a phenomenon of rising water temperatures in the Pacific tropics, accompanied by extreme heat in summer and frost in winter. This time, even without El Niño, the oceans are unusually warm – the global ocean in March was 0.8 degrees warmer than average for the month. The warmer the ocean, the stronger the hurricanes. They cause the most damage in the United States, the richest country in the world, which has suffered more than others from the coronavirus. The hurricane season there begins in June.
Hurricanes cause billions of dollars in damage to the United States each year. In addition, it rains more intensely over the warmer oceans than over the cooler land, depriving the continents of rain and causing drought. Rising temperatures in the western part of the Indian Ocean are causing dry summers and forest fires in Australia, and warming waters in the North Atlantic threaten to dry out and burn the forests of the Amazon basin. Global warming is dangerous not so much because of the actual warming, but because it causes disruptions in the usual weather patterns, scientists warn. Suddenly, heat becomes unbearable, cold becomes harsher, wind becomes a hurricane, and rain becomes a deluge.
Last year is a case in point. According to the latest data from the European Center Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2019 was the hottest year in Europe on record. But that doesn’t mean Europeans have been ditching their raincoats and stocking up on sunscreen. Although February, June, and July were marked by unprecedented heat, November brought record rainfall and widespread flooding. And this picture is not new. In general, for almost two decades of the current century, Europe has experienced 11 out of 12 record-breaking hot years. This year is no exception. In the heart of Europe, the Geneva and Grenoble region hasn’t seen more than 40 days without rain since the end of the 19th century. And it was only this week that the skies finally opened up.
“Warming in Europe is well above the global trend,” says Professor Rowan Sutton of the UK’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research. “The data over the last 40 years clearly show this.” Water levels in reservoirs in Ukraine and Romania have dropped to critical levels. Half of France’s farmland is so dry that farmers are sounding the alarm.
Finding weed in Corsica in July 2019 was not easy. Germany is also dry, but officials are not in a panic, although they are concerned about the situation because the last two years have been drought-prone, said Agriculture Minister Julia Klöckner. “Of course, many people are happy about the good weather, but farmers are very worried. They remember well the droughts of 2018 and 2019, which robbed them of their crops and income,” she said, reminding them of another danger: the risk of forest fires.
The leading wheat producers – Russia and Kazakhstan, seeing how their biggest competitors in Europe are suffering, have restricted grain exports. They fear that increased demand in rich countries will lead to an increase in exports and a shortage in the domestic market. At the same time, the dry and warm weather has its advantages: with not a cloud in the sky for several weeks in most of Europe, renewable energy is meeting an increasing share of the continent’s electricity needs. In Germany, solar farms can provide up to 40% of the country’s energy on some days, and day-ahead prices are increasingly negative – consumers are actually being paid to feed electricity into the grid. In the first three months of this year, the price of 15-minute power contracts fell below zero nearly 800 times. This is 80% more often than last year, according to Bloomberg data from the European exchange Epex Spot.
The drought has not only affected Europe. The Argentine pampas and the American prairies are also parched. In the United States, Texas, California, and Oregon are already in the second stage of drought, according to the local five-tier scale, while a dozen states are “very dry” (third stage), mainly in the South, along the Mexican border, in the Central region, and in the Northwest: from Alabama to Washington. However, it is still too early to talk about crop damage. The next two to three months will be crucial for the maturation of grain crops – the basis of nutrition for most of the world’s people and livestock. And the overall condition of the world’s crops does not appear to be threatened.
In addition, thanks to last year’s bumper harvest, global grain stocks are overflowing, with reserves at record levels. It would be worthwhile to calm down and say goodbye, but an uninvited guest intervened – the coronavirus. Due to the pandemic, the unpleasant but bearable situation in the familiar reality has taken on new colors. The pandemic has disrupted the logistics of the global food market: there is a shortage of healthy workers in warehouses and ports, trucks sit idle without drivers. Planes and containers are nowhere to be found. Shipments have plummeted.
German farmers are forced to attract locals to pick asparagus: Poles and Romanians won’t come, even though Germany has relaxed requirements for seasonal workers. Meanwhile, the harvest is rotting in the fields because agriculture is one of the main employers of migrant workers. But quarantines prevent coffee pickers from reaching plantations in Latin America, Moroccans from entering Spain to pick strawberries, and Romanians and Bulgarians from rushing to Britain and Germany. It all smacks of a new food crisis. But unlike the previous two crises in 2007-2008 and 2010-2012, this time the problem is not a lack of food. It is actually an excess. Now the problem is how to collect it and distribute it to the supermarkets.
The threat of a food crisis, combined with the coronavirus pandemic, is leading to serious costs for the rich countries and a tendency towards protectionism. This is an excellent reason to reduce aid to poor countries, which populists have long opposed: why help far-off Africa, they protest, when we have homeless people starving and falling ill on the steps of boutiques in Detroit and Liverpool. It was hard to imagine a worse time for such moods.
“Even without a pandemic of the deadly virus, the year 2020 promised the world the biggest humanitarian crisis since World War II, world leaders warned long before the emergence of Covid-19,” said David Beasley, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme. And now, as a result of the “perfect storm,” thirty poor countries could face widespread famine this year. Tens and hundreds of thousands of people will die, and to prevent that, Bizley says, aid must not only not be reduced, it must be increased.
Hordes of locusts have been wreaking havoc in East Africa since January. According to the latest UN data, nearly 1 billion people in the world suffer from chronic malnutrition – one in eight people on the planet. And because of the coronavirus crisis, that number will increase by 130 million by 2020 alone. Bizli warns that 265 million people will go hungry. The United Nations World Food Programme, which he heads, is the largest humanitarian organization in the world. It feeds nearly 100 million people every day. If this aid is suddenly cut off, up to 300,000 people will starve to death every day. For three months, every day, the number of people dying will be equal to the population of cities like Simferopol, Chernihiv, or Vladikavkaz.
“We are facing not only a global pandemic, but also a global humanitarian catastrophe,” said Bizli. “Millions of ordinary citizens in conflict-torn countries are at risk. The specter of hunger is more real and more dangerous than ever. In the worst-case scenario, thirty countries are threatened by famine. Drought, virus, and famine all at once – too much even for a mediocre disaster movie. But the script of 2020 was written by unruly students from Hollywood, and they didn’t hesitate to add tragedy in the form of an invading swarm of locusts. Thanks to a warm and rainy winter, ravenous creatures of biblical proportions have hatched in Yemen. By the time the world became concerned about the coronavirus, locusts were devouring vegetation in 23 countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. The World Bank has declared the invasion the most terrifying in a generation – and that was before the second, even more massive wave had fully manifested. Locust swarms are maturing in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Iran. She will have something to live on – the crops in Africa are just beginning to sprout. This year’s harvest is in great doubt.