Climate change has had a large impact on the biodiversity of Earth's ecosystems. One example is the rise of Earth's temperature, which has resulted in droughts in some regions. Which of these is the most likely impact of droughts caused by climate change?

While droughts can have different causes depending on the area of the world and other natural factors, the majority of scientists have started to link more intense droughts to climate change. That's because as more greenhouse gas emissions are released into the air, causing air temperatures to increase, more moisture evaporates from land and lakes, rivers, and other bodies of water. Warmer temperatures also increase evaporation in plant soils, which affects plant life and can reduce rainfall even more. And when rainfall does come to drought-stricken areas, the drier soils it hits are less able to absorb the water, increasing the likelihood of flooding - a lose-lose situation.

Explanation:

Droughts are among the most expensive weather-related disasters in the world (pdf), affecting ecosystems, agriculture and human society.

The scale of the impacts underlines how important it is to understand droughts and how their likelihood and severity can be made worse by climate change.

But this is easier said than done. For a start, drought is fundamentally a cross-disciplinary phenomenon - it extends across the fields of meteorology, climatology, hydrology, ecology, agronomy, and even sociology, economics, and anthropology.