The truly global disruption

While we rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic

Jim and Sara Nuttle illustration from “America’s New Map”

Great titling here by NYT:

Drought Touches a Quarter of Humanity, U.N. Says, Disrupting Lives Globally

The crisis, worsened partly by climate change, has been accompanied by soaring food prices and could have consequences for hunger, elections and migration worldwide.

Almost sums up America’s New Map: climate change, food insecurity, political impacts, migration around the world … really, just missing demographics and the global middle class.

It gets increasingly hard to talk about one of these items and not all the others, as the interconnections and dependencies become more glaring over time.

Somini Sengupta is always excellent:

Olive groves have shriveled in Tunisia. The Brazilian Amazon faces its driest season in a century. Wheat fields have been decimated in Syria and Iraq, pushing millions more into hunger after years of conflict. The Panama Canal, a vital trade artery, doesn’t have enough water, which means fewer ships can pass through. And the fear of drought has prompted India, the world’s biggest rice exporter, to restrict the export of most rice varieties.

The United Nations estimates that 1.84 billion people worldwide, or nearly a quarter of humanity, were living under drought in 2022 and 2023, the vast majority in low- and middle-income countries.

And virtually all of them found within my Middle Earth designation of a latitudinal band stretching 30 degrees north and south of the equator.