Australia should prepare for 20-year megadroughts as the climate crisis worsens, study finds

Researchers say Australia should prepare for ‘megadroughts’ that will worsen due to human-induced global heating. Photograph: Outback Australia/Alamy

Australia should prepare for “megadroughts” that last more than 20 years and will worsen due to human-induced global heating, new research has found.

Megadroughts are exceptionally severe periods of below average rainfall that last decades. Climate modelling by the Australian National University, published in the journal of Hydrology and Earth System Sciences last week, found droughts spanning more than two decades have occurred in Australia over the past millennia and reoccur every 150 to 1,000 years, depending on the modelling used.