Drought is a climatic condition, which is characterized by lack of precipitation and dryness. Drought prone areas are identified by a deficit of rainfall received in a particular area. The parameters to identify drought prone areas vary depending on the natural climatic conditions.
Drought can be defined as the deficiency in precipitation over an extended period, usually a season or more, resulting in a water shortage causing adverse impacts on vegetation, animals, and/or people (NOAA, 2008).
It is a temporary anomaly, unlike aridity, which is a permanent climatic condition. Droughts are different from other natural disasters as they are slow-onset shocks with prolonged and potentially devastating consequences.
The impacts are generally difficult to quantify as the duration may range from months to years and no single indicator can identify precisely the onset and severity of the event. Dry conditions occur due to different reasons thus making it difficult to outline a particular definition of drought.
There are four approaches based on which drought has been classified to reflect different perspectives (Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, 2009).
- Meteorological drought is usually defined based on the dryness and the duration of the dry period with respect to long term average – 25 per cent or less to the long term average is normal, 26-50 per cent is moderate and more than 50 per cent is severe.
- Agricultural drought links various characteristics of meteorological drought to agriculture impacts like precipitation shortages, soil water deficit, reduced ground water level needed for irrigation etc. It is identified by four consecutive weeks of meteorological drought with a weekly rainfall of 50 mm or less from and six such consecutive weeks for the rest of the year. Almost 80 per cent of crops in India are planted in the Kharif season.
- Hydrological drought refers to persistently low water volumes in streams, rivers and reservoirs. Such conditions arise even in times of average (or above average) precipitation when increased usage of water diminishes the reserves. This results in significant societal impacts.
The drought-prone areas of the country are confined to the arid, semi-arid, and sub-humid regions of peninsular and western India. Around 68 per cent of the area in India is found to be prone to drought to different degrees. 35 per cent of the country’s area which receives annual rainfall between 750 mm and 1125 mm is considered drought prone while 33 per cent receiving less than 750 mm is considered chronically drought prone (Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, 2016).
Impact of drought disasters
The impacts of drought are multidimensional because the adequate availability of water is an integral factor for agricultural production, and a country’s ability to produce goods and services. Some of the direct impacts of drought are reduction in agricultural production and heightened food insecurity among the poor and vulnerable sections, lack of access to clean water, depletion of water resources, damage to ecosystems and biodiversity, fire hazards etc.
The indirect impacts are reduction of income for farmers, increase in food and fodder prices, defaults from agricultural loans causing debt and bondage, farmer suicides, social conflicts over minimal resources etc. Displacement of people, migration and loss of livelihood are also some of the very common indirect impacts. Thus, droughts have a cascading impact on all levels of social strata, which could be environmental, economic or social.
The 2016 Drought Management Manual and the Crisis Management Plan
Policies and frameworks undergo amendments routinely and one such is the revision Manual for Drought Management, 2009 that was amended in 2016. The revised manual states that the central and state governments shall do the monitoring of drought by following parameters which indicates the onset of drought like situation – rainfall, remote sensing based vegetative indices, crop situation indices, hydrological indices, ground truth variation which is further elaborated into 13 sub-points (Indian Drought Manual, 2016).
The intensity of drought, or a drought disaster shall be declared depending on the values of three indicators. This move was met with criticism from states like Karnataka as the new norms are technically extensive and too stringent to be practical.
Furthermore, the ‘moderate’ category of drought is being omitted from the manual, which means the drought prone areas would come under two categories which is either ‘normal’ or ‘severe’. Thus, states are eligible for financial assistance from the centre only in case of severe drought.
The Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare (DAC&FW) under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare is the apex body for formulation of policies and various institutional structures at national and state level for drought management.
Drought Management Cell (DMC) of the department helps gather information from diverse sources, monitor drought conditions, issue advisories, coordinate Ministries within the Central and State Government and other concerned agencies to mitigate the effects of drought. The department also updates and reviews the Crisis Management Plan (CMP) every year.
CMP focuses on management interventions required during the time of drought disasters. It is a programme that delineates roles and responsibilities of stakeholders, including Central and State Governments and their agencies in managing the calamity.
Some important features of the Management Plan includes: Crisis Management Framework (CMF) aimed at identification of fundamental crisis situations like phases of crisis, magnitude, impact, triggers and strategic response mechanism.
It is also envisaged that a Crisis Management Group (CMG) for drought management would come up to manage the various phases of drought at central, state and district level. Another important feature is the creation of separate Drought Monitoring Centers (DMCs) at state level which would report to the State Disaster Management Authorities (SDMA).
Unfortunately, the problem for drought management is not the lack of policies and framework but the paucity of proper formulation and implementation. The recent episodes of drought disasters of unprecedented drought in south Indian states are an indicator of lack of efficient management strategy.
In the year 2016, Tamil Nadu was monsoon deficient by close to 62 per cent, Kerala faced its worst drought in 115 years affecting more than 17,000 ha of agricultural land and Andhra Pradesh recorded rainfall deficient by 23 per cent. Thus, strengthening and enhancing the institutional mechanisms for monitoring and reporting of drought at national and state level is essential.
Along with effective policies, development in technology through enhanced scientific research could foster the already available monitoring and early warning systems of drought conditions. The use of remote sensing to provide timely meteorological data and information like soil moisture, reservoir storage etc. to farmers would help in mitigating the economic and social distress caused by drought.
This could be done through media management and use of social networking system. It would also enhance the timely execution of District Agriculture Contingency Plan (DACP). Some other measures that could be taken up in grassroots level are investing in water harvesting system technologies and availing subsidised drought prone seed varieties to farmers.
Moreover, building drought adaptation strategies is also inevitable as drought conditions and unpredictable shift in rainfall pattern is projected to increase due to climate change. Food security of a nation is deeply interlinked with drought as it poses as a constant threat to reduction of agricultural produce and subsequent food shortage.
It affects the whole dimension of agriculture- production, availability, stability, accessibility and utilization. Thus, it is very important for an agrarian nation like India to be drought smart and drought resilient to sustain the huge population.
All of the preventive and mitigating measures for drought disasters require coordinated efforts and systematic communication between the central and state governments, scientific institutions, relevant agencies and farmers alike.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.