Hundreds of thousands of people in southern and eastern parts of China are facing drinking water shortages as a result of months of reduced rainfall, the central government says.

The Ministry of Water Resources said on Thursday that more than 500,000 hectares of arable land had been affected by the drought, leaving 330,000 people in rural areas without a sufficient supply of potable water.

Since October, rainfall in regions south of the Yangtze River had been 50 to 80 per cent lower than normal, it said.

About 2.4 million people in the provinces of Zhejiang, Guangdong and Fujian had already been affected by the drought, and concerns were growing in Guangxi, Hunan and Yunnan, the ministry said.

In Taizhou, Zhejiang, the residents of Sanmen county are dealing with their worst drought in 50 years, according to a report by state broadcaster CCTV.

Earth was besieged by a record 50 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2020, the most such disasters ever recorded after adjusting for inflation, said insurance broker Aon (formerly called Aon Benfield) in its annual report issued January 25. The previous record was 46 billion-dollar weather disasters, set in 2010 and 2011. The annual average of billion-dollar weather disasters since records began in 1990 is 29.

The combined economic losses (insured and uninsured) from all 416 weather and earthquake disasters cataloged by Aon in 2020 was $268 billion (2020 USD). Most of the 2020 total, by far, came from weather-related disasters ($258 billion), 29% above the 2001-2020 inflation-adjusted average. Those numbers make 2020 the fifth costliest year on record for weather-related disasters.

The year was the most expensive ever for severe weather (including severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, and hail), with $63 billion in damage (previous record: $53 billion in 2011). More than 80% of the severe weather damage occurred in the U.S. in 2020, including the costliest severe weather outbreak in world history, according to Aon: an August 2020 event that featured a violent derecho in the U.S. midwest that caused $11 billion of the $12.6 billion in damage of the outbreak, the balance caused by tornadoes, hail, and other severe thunderstorms.

Insured damage from wildfires in 2020 was $12 billion - the third highest on record, behind only 2017 and 2018. The year 2020 marked the third time in the past four years that global insured losses from wildfires exceeded $10 billion - a threshold never crossed prior to 2017. Remarkably, wildfire has caused more than $70 billion in insured losses since 2000, 75% of that in the past five years alone.

Several consulting and agribusiness firms have stated the same facts after the Global Grains Geneva meetings, we have reached the point of no surplus on the planet for corn, soybeans and wheat. The world needs to find 24 million new acres to grow grains moving forward. What we grow is what we have from this point forward. Sainsbury closes all deli counters for fish, meats.

Its official the stay at home economy as 75% of CEO's in the US rent less office space as wine yields down but champagne sales crash 33.3%, interesting number in the media. A look at craft spotted from the ISS look remarkably like functional electrogravitics propulsion systems. New book you may want to find, Farming and Gardening Survival Book S.E USA.

Like a baseball slugger whose home run totals rise despite missing more curveballs each season, the U.S. Corn Belt's prodigious output conceals a growing vulnerability. A new Stanford study reveals that while yields have increased overall — likely due to new technologies and management approaches — the staple crop has become significantly more sensitive to drought conditions. The research, published Oct. 26 in Nature Food, uses a novel approach based on wide differences in the moisture-holding capabilities among soils. The analysis could help lay the groundwork for speeding development of approaches to increase agricultural resilience to climate change.

"The good news is that new technologies are really helping to raise yields, in all types of weather conditions," said study lead author David Lobell, the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment. "The bad news is that these technologies, which include some specifically designed to withstand drought, are so helpful in good conditions that the cost of bad conditions are rising. So there's no sign yet that they will help reduce the cost of climate change."

Wild weather is wreaking havoc on crops around the world, sending their prices skyrocketing.

On wheat farms in the U.S. and Russia, it's a drought that's ruining harvests. The soybean fields of Brazil are bone dry too, touched by little more than the occasional shower. In Vietnam, Malaysia and Indonesia, the problem is the exact opposite. Torrential downpours are causing flooding in rice fields and stands of oil palm trees.

The sudden emergence of these supply strains is a big blow to a global economy that has been struggling to regain its footing after the shock of the Covid-19 lockdowns. As prices soar on everything from sugar to cooking oil, millions of working-class families that had already been forced to scale back food purchases in the pandemic are being thrust deeper into financial distress.

What's more, these increases threaten to push up broader inflation indexes in some countries and could make it harder for central bankers to keep providing monetary stimulus to shore up growth.

The Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index, a gauge of nine crop prices, has risen 28% since late April to its highest level in more than four years. Wheat earlier this week was the most expensive since 2014.

"The fundamentals have changed dramatically since May," said Don Roose, president of brokerage U.S. Commodities in Iowa. "The weather is bubbling to the top, and we have demand chugging in a bull market."

The Paraguay River has reached its lowest level in half a century after months of extreme drought in the region, exposing the vulnerability of landlocked Paraguay's economy.

Some 85% percent of Paraguay's foreign trade is conducted via the river, which has been depleted because of a lack of rainfall in the Pantanal area of Mato Grosso state in Brazil. The river flows from that area and also runs through Bolivia and Argentina.

The fall in the water level has slowed down cargo vessel traffic on the Paraguay River, causing significant cost overruns for the transport of fuel, fertilizer, food and other imported goods. The crisis has also exposed the precariousness of Paraguay's access to drinking water.

"We have never had a situation as serious as the one we are experiencing now. We are approaching the end of the year, a time when more products must enter," Nery Giménez, president of the Paraguayan Importers Center, told The Associated Press.

We are beginning to see the interlacing of Grand Soar Minimum intensification reducing the length of growing seasons, leading to higher food prices where people cannot afford to eat after all of the business closures across continents. This is pushing the need for food banks, but China experienced the worst crop wipe out in the last 200 year and are actively buying grain and commodity crops across the planet, driving up prices further. This in turn adds 10% to food prices where more people can't afford food, sending them to food banks. Record waterspout count in the Great Lakes as South America enters a drought further reducing global grain totals. The spiral is in play.

Country faces more than 5,000 fires, with yellow smoke reaching the capital as neighbouring Brazil and Argentina face blazes

Devastating wildfires have broken out across across Paraguay, as drought and record high temperatures continue to exacerbate blazes across South America.

A total of 5,231 individual wildfires broke out across the country on 1 October - up 3,000 on the previous day. Most of were concentrated in the arid Chaco region in the west of the country, but thick yellow smoke had reached as far as the capital, Asunción.

Paraguay's outbreak came as the southern hemisphere heads into summer and neighbouring countries also face unprecedented wildfires. The Brazilian Amazon is recording its worst blazes in a decade, with numbers up 61% on the widely reported fires of last year, and separate fires in the southern Pantanal region.

Meteorologists track hurricanes over the oceans, forecasting where and when landfall might occur so residents can prepare for disaster before it strikes. What if they could do the same thing for droughts?

Stanford scientists have now shown that may be possible in some instances — the researchers have identified a new kind of "landfalling drought" that can potentially be predicted before it impacts people and ecosystems on land. They found that these droughts, which form over the ocean and then migrate landward, can cause larger and drier conditions than droughts that occur solely over the land. Of all the droughts affecting land areas worldwide from 1981 to 2018, roughly one in six were landfalling droughts, according to the study published Sept. 21 in Water Resources Research.

"We normally don't think about droughts over the ocean — it may even sound counterintuitive. But just as over land, there can be times where large regions in the ocean experience less rainfall than normal," said lead author Julio Herrera-Estrada, a research collaborator with Water in the West who conducted research for the study while he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford's School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth). "Finding that some droughts start offshore will hopefully motivate conversations about the benefits of monitoring and forecasting droughts beyond the continents."