The world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, famine and mass displacement that will fuel more conflict for decades .
Barack Obama
According to the Oxford dictionary a drought is a ‘prolonged period of abnormally low rainfall, leading to a shortage of water.’
Most of the damaging droughts happened in China, followed by the United States of America, Somalia and Mozambique.
Most people killed by droughts lived in Somalia, more than 20 000 between 2000 and 2017, followed by Malawi, China and Burundi.
According to recent studies an increased occurrence of such events due to climate change and global warming is highly likely.
Colour Key
Reference Map
Technical Notes This map shows the proportion of all people dying from droughts between 2000 and 2017.
Data sources This map uses data by EM-DAT: The Emergency Events Database – (last accessed March 2018). We aim to map as complete data as possible and therefore estimate data for missing values. In some cases, missing data for very small territories is not used in the cartogram and that area is therefore omitted in the map.
Further notes on the data, as well as all modifications to the original data source are noted in our data sheets.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International License .
