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Millions of householders will face a hosepipe ban from Friday, a utility company has confirmed.
United Utilities, which supplies water to north-west England, said the measure will help "safeguard essential supplies".
Water levels in many reservoirs and lakes have plummeted to less than half their capacity due to the region's driest start to the year since 1929.

United Utilities uk drought hosepipe ban water greennumbers

"Globally, the average number of major weather-related catastrophes such as windstorms, floods or droughts is now three times as high as at the beginning of the 1980s. Losses have risen even more, with average increases of 11 percent per year since 1980, the reinsurance company Munich Re says in a statement.

"Something must be done."

climate change greenmonktv weather-related catastrophes windstorms floods drought munich re

Millions of people in Nepal face severe food shortages because global climate change has disrupted weather patterns and slashed crop yields in the Himalayan nation, an international aid agency warned Friday.

Changing weather patterns have dramatically affected crop production in Nepal, leaving farmers unable to properly feed themselves and pushing them into debt, Oxfam International said in a report released in Katmandu.

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California is in the midst of an ugly debate about water--uglier than normal--because of a confluence of events, including a "hydrologic" drought caused by nature, a longer-term trend to restore some water back to failing ecosystems, and the gross mismanagement of the state's water, which has been going on for a century, but is affecting us now more than ever.

But despite all of the rhetoric, news stories, name-calling, yelling, and screaming, Californians have very little clue about what a real water crisis looks like. It looks like what's happening in Australia.

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Emergency organisations could be overwhelmed within seven years by the rising number of people in poor countries affected by floods, droughts, heatwaves, wild fires, storms, landslides and other climate hazards.

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I read with horror this morning that over 1,500 farmers in India committed mass suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure.

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Northern China is dry in the best of times. But a long rainless stretch has underscored the urgency of water problems in a region that grows three-fifths of China’s crops and houses more than two-fifths of its people — but gets only one-fifth as much rain as the rest of the country.
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The New York Times

Northern China grows three-fifths of the country’s crops.

The current drought, considered the worst in Northern China in at least half a century, is crippling not only the country’s best wheat farmland, but also the wells that provide clean water to industry and to millions of people.

china drought wheat winter wheat rain

Among the challenges facing the next president, few are more complex—scientifically, politically, and economically—than the unsustainable global demands on fresh water supplies. Sources are drying up in the US and worldwide, raising the specters of hunger, disease, and international conflict. No one has a clearer view of these issues than Peter Gleick, president and cofounder of the Pacific Institute, an Oakland, California-based environmental think tank. So what will the new president need to understand about water? Here are eight slides from Gleick's hypothetical PowerPoint presentation.

water peter gleick drought

An irrigation farm larger than Singapore and sucking up billions of litres of water each year has been bought by Australia's government to help save one of the country's most vital rivers from a slow death and climate change.

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