ABSTRACT
Drought is different from most other environmental hazards. It is called a ‘creeping’ hazard because droughts develop slowly and have a prolonged existence, sometimes over several years. Unlike earthquakes or floods, droughts are not constrained to a particular tectonic or topographic setting. They can extend over regions sub-continental in scale and affect several counties. Therefore, drought is similar to context hazards (Chapter 14). The human impact of drought varies between countries more than any other hazard. National wealth is the main criterion. There are no deaths from drought in the developed countries but, in many LDCs, the effect of unusually low rainfall on already precarious food supplies may create a link between drought and famine-related death. But, in many LDCs, drought is only part of a ‘complex emergency’ where food shortage may result from various combinations of war, poverty, agricultural policy and environmental degradation as well as rainfall deficiency. Consequently, direct drought impacts are often difficult to assess. As a result, a revised procedure was recently adopted for drought entries in the EM-DAT record held by CRED for the 1900-2004 period. This reclassification led to some reduction in the original number of recorded drought events but drought-
related deaths increased to the extent that more than half of all deaths associated with natural hazards were attributed to drought (Below et al. 2007).
