Regional droughts are common in North America, but pan-continental droughts extending across multiple regions, including the 2012 event, are rare relative to single-region events. Here, the tree-ring-derived North American Drought Atlas is used to investigate drought variability in four regions over the last millennium, focusing on pan-continental droughts. During the Medieval Climate Anomaly (...

The disintegration of the Classic Maya civilization in the Yucatán Peninsula and Central America was a complex process that occurred over an approximately 200-year interval and involved a catastrophic depopulation of the region. Although it is well established that the civilization collapse coincided with widespread episodes of drought, their nature and severity remain enigmatic. We present a q...

The potential of East African Rift Valley lakes as sources for robust equatorial climate records has been greatly demonstrated (Gasse, 1989; Johnson, 1996; Livingstone, 1965; Livingstone, 1975), yet studies of annual-to-decadal scale late-Holocene climatic variations are few (Cole et al., 2000; Johnson, 2001; Russell et al., 2003; Verschuren et al., 2000). Such studies are exceedingly important...

Bilateral and multilateral development cooperation agencies are to an increasing extent promoting and adopting a sector-wide approach (SWAp) in their development cooperation. The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), for example, joined their first sector-wide approach cooperation in the late 90s, and today they are involved in SWAps in countries in Africa, Asia and Latin...

Amazon forests experienced two severe droughts at the beginning of the 21st century: one in 2005 and the other in 2010. How Amazon forests responded to these droughts is critical for the future of the Earth’s climate system. It is only possible to assess Amazon forests’ response to the droughts in large areal extent through satellite remote sensing. Here, we used the Multi-Angle Implementation ...

The comprehensive assessment of climatic and hydrological droughts in terms of their temporal and spatial evolutions is very important for water resources management and social development in the basin scale. To study the spatial and temporal changes of climatic and hydrological droughts and the relationships between them, the SPEI and SDI are adopted to assess the changes and the correlations ...

1 Although drought frequency and severity are predicted to increase across numerous continental interiors, the consequences of these changes for dominant plants are largely unknown. Over the last decade, the south-western US has experienced six drought years, including the extreme droughts of 1996 and 2002, which led to widespread tree mortality across northern Arizona. 2 We examined the impact...