Drought

Drought - California, USA

An astonishing 12.5m trees have died in California, unable to survive a harsh fourth year of drought, according to a US government study.

The news of the massive tree die-offs came this week, after the United States Forest Service, a Department of Agriculture agency, released the results of an aerial survey it undertook in April over 8.2m acres of forest.

The California drought has now entered its fourth year. On 1 April, California governor Jerry Brown imposed the first set of mandatory water use restriction measures – a step never before taken in the state’s history. Brown said the drought had reached “near-crisis” levels.

Aerial photos from the survey show a landscape of red, purple and brown trees – the dead ones – interspersed among the usual green. Even those green ones were sometimes lighter and yellower than usual, a sign of distress.

The sudden prevalence of such an abnormal amount of dead trees in California’s forests – a scale of loss not seen since the 1970s droughts – has raised concern more broadly about the increased risks of wildfires.