Unit 22 Environmental Protection
Lesson 3 Unnatural Disasters Hell and High Water
The last few years have been the worst period on record for environmental disasters and experts are predicting far worse to come. Jin Li reports. A In the last decade, floods, droughts, windstorms, earthquakes, typhoons, volcanic eruptions and froese fires have become increasingly common. There has been disastrous flooding in Asia, Africa, America and Oceania. Even prospers Europe has sufferd and and large areas from the Britain to Germany have all been down the water. Storms have been getting worse everywhere too, with a growing number of hurricanes hitting the US, the Caribbean and Central America. Drought has affected large areas of Africa for years and many other zones are becoming drier. For example, the Yellow River once notorious for flooding the Chinese landscape, failed to reach the sea at all on 226 days, in 1997. A number of nations have already been in armed conflict over water, and drought in the West of the US has resulted in enormous forest fires.