In addition to smart thermostats and smart ads, we also need smart agriculture that can combine weather forecasts, soil and air sensor readings, and other data to help farmers know when they must water and do other tasks to help their farms keep producing in a world of droughts and increasing famine.

In a new paper in Nature Communications, researchers led by Yusuke Satoh look at how places we normally see as lush are likely to face unprecedented levels of drought in the coming decades. Using computer models that considered futures with various levels of greenhouse gas emissions, they studied how rainfall & water distribution via rivers will change over time, and they found trends toward severe drought in three regions: Southwestern South America, Mediterranean Europe, and Northern Africa.

In their simulations, they found that climate change won’t affect every place the same. Some areas will face little change, while others will become hotspots of multi-year droughts that exceed what has been seen in the past 141 years.

No lies — I and many of my friends have looked at climate models before deciding where on the planet we wanted to live.

These changes are expected to start impacting our world in the next fifty years. This is our future.

More Information

In the near future, unprecedented drought conditions are projected to be more frequent and consecutive in certain regions (EurekAlert)

“The timing of unprecedented hydrological drought under climate change,” Yusuke Satoh et al., 2022 June 28, Nature Communications