{"id":49466,"date":"2025-08-07T03:32:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T03:32:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/49466\/"},"modified":"2025-08-07T03:32:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-07T03:32:10","slug":"the-earth-is-drying-out-and-we-need-to-act-urgently","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/49466\/","title":{"rendered":"The Earth is Drying Out and We Need to Act Urgently"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might not believe it if you’ve experienced one of the flash floods hammering the planet from Texas<\/a> to Vietnam<\/a> this summer, but the Earth is becoming drier \u2014 at least the parts where most people live. Given how this can affect every aspect of human existence, from farming to geopolitics, it\u2019s past time we started treating this like the emergency it is. <\/p>\n

Measurements from NASA\u2019s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites suggest the continents have been losing fresh water<\/a> at an alarming rate since 2002, according to a recent study in the journal Science Advances. Some parts of the planet are becoming wetter, especially in the tropics, but the drying parts are drying more quickly than the increasingly wet parts are getting wet. The drying parts are also spreading, gaining roughly two Californias\u2019 worth of land every year and recently merging into \u201cmega-drying\u201d regions sprawling across vast stretches of continents. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You might not believe it if you’ve experienced one of the flash floods hammering the planet from Texas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[3711,2658,891,556,14530,1397,27525,9027,90,3329,56,54,55,5673,10976],"class_list":["post-49466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-africa","tag-alaska","tag-china","tag-climate-change","tag-colorado","tag-environment","tag-farming","tag-national-aeronautics-and-space-administration","tag-science","tag-texas","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-vietnam","tag-view"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}