Droughts (Indonesia) #1

Introduction

Though droughts are simply a significant deficit in moisture availability, they have been categorised into three different situations. Meteorological Drought is a situation where there is a significant decrease from normal rainfall over an area. Agricultural Drought occurs when soil moisture and rainfall is inadequate during the growing season to support crops and causes crop stress and wilting. Hydrological Drought is said to have occurred when lakes and reservoirs dry up and there is a fall in the groundwater level. Socioeconomic Drought occurs when the demand for an economic good exceeds supply as a result of a weather-related shortfall in water supply.



Indian Ocean Shift and Global Warming Seen Stoking Indonesia Droughts

Annual variations in Indonesia's climate are largely determined by the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system. However, extreme drought can also result from the cooling of sea surface temperatures near Sumatra caused by a similar ocean-atmosphere phenomenon--the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). These two systems have a past and present relationship to the Asian monsoon .Scientists findings reveal that drought frequency and duration in Indonesia can be expected to increase with global warming.

Future Implications:

Most scientists agree that as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions increase and global temperature rises, the Asian monsoon, which has been decreasing in strength since the middle Holocene, is likely to intensify. A number of uncertainties prevail, however, including the impact of a changing ENSO and the influence of human-produced aerosols.

Still, if the relationships between these climate systems hold, more droughts in Indonesia and possibly throughout the Australasian region, could have substantial socio-economic impacts, such as an increased occurrence of forest fires.
All of these likely physical effects will present greater challenges to Indonesia, which has already lost large tracts of forest to deforestation and illegal logging practices and has a national poverty rate of around 27%. Achieving reductions in poverty and furthering sustainable development initiatives are therefore all the more critical.

More droughts could disrupt agriculture, slow an Indonesian drive to end poverty, lead to more wildfires that cause both smog and deforestation, threaten wildlife habitats and disrupt hydropower generation. The scientists said recent stronger monsoons had been widely linked by scientists to a global warming blamed on human burning of fossil fuels. But most studies of monsoon have focused on the likelihood of more rains in India and other parts of Asia.

"Our findings suggest that the some of the knock-on effects will cause more widespread consequences ... than previously thought," said Nerilie Abram of the Australian National University of the report in the journal Nature.