Somalia, Kenya, and now Ethiopia are warning of a serious drought (干旱)that affects millions of people in Eastern Africa. In Ethiopia’s Somali area, people have seen the failures of what should have been three straight rainy seasons. Droughts do come and go over the years. However, the lack of rainfall has led to the driest conditions in 40 years in parts of Somalia and Ethiopia.

UNICEF is the United Nation’s children’s agency. Local Zaynab Wali told a visiting team with UNICEF that she and her seven children had never seen a drought like this. She said the government gave out food for animals during the last drought five years ago. “This time, we even don’t have enough food for our family.”

Children walk among the bodies of dead animals, which died from lack of food and energy. Somalia Consortium works to improve international aid for Somalia. It said in a separate statement that in Somalia, more than 7 million people need emergency help. It is asking international organizations to give much more to the country.

“We are just one month into the long dry season, and I have already lost 25 goats and sheep,” Hafsa Bedel in Ethiopia’s Somali area told UNICEF. She also lost four camels, a large desert animal, as well. She said there was nowhere for her animals to eat. She added that there was not enough food for her own family, including her six children.

UNICEF thinks that more than 150,000 children in such areas of Ethiopia have dropped out of school. They are needed to help find the limited amount of water and help their families with other work.

One young boy was seen supporting an animal, a donkey. The donkey was once important for carrying goods. But now, it had become too weak to walk on its own.

The latest data form Nature’s Calendar shows that the butterflies, newts and neat-building blackbirds have been spotted months before they would normally appear. An analysis of the conditions in 2019 found that all but one of the 50 spring events the scheme（计划）tracks were early last year, as a result of warmer winter temperatures. The Woodland Trust, which runs the Nature’s Calendar scheme, warns that many species are losing their seasonal cues（提示）as winters warm and seasons shift.

Increasingly unstable weather could tempt some animals out of hibernation（冬眠）too soon, only to be hit by sharply dropping temperatures. And some birds appeared to be breeding too late as they make the most of vital food sources that appear earlier than normal, the Trust said.

Lorienne Whittle, at the Woodland Trust, said, “ It seems that last year we almost lost winter as a season--it was much milder and our data shows wildlife is responding, potentially putting many at risk.”

And she said, “It appears that some species are able to adapt to the advancing spring better than others. Oak trees respond by producing their first leaves earlier and caterpillars seem to be keeping pace. But blue tits, great tits and pied flycatchers are struggling to react in time for their chicks to take advantage of the peak amount of caterpillars--the food source on which they depend.”

Active newts were recorded in late December in Cheshire and a blackbird was spotted building a nest at the beginning of January. Accordingly, a report for The Wildlife Trusts suggested that hedgerows（树篱）be protected from being cut during the nesting season.

Heat is a killer —and climate change is driving up its body count. On average, about 37 percent of heat deaths can be tied back to human-caused climate change, according to a new study in Nature Climate Change.

The study looked at data from 732 places in 43 countries over a period of about three decades, from 1991 –2018. They used information including heat deaths and temperature readings from those places to build computer models that calculated how many deaths could be related to climate change.

The numbers varied depending on location, with a larger percentage of climate-change related deaths occurring in warmer countries than cooler ones.

"Overall, about 166,000 people died of heat-related deaths between 1998 and 2017, according to the World Health Organization. Due to climate change, more people are being exposed to heat waves than ever before. Between 2000 and 2016, the number of people exposed to heat waves increased by around 125 million.

There is one obvious limitation to this new study - while hundreds of locations were included, many areas of Africa and Southeast Asia were not, due to a lack of data. Gathering that information in the future will be very important for new efforts to create a global accounting of heat-related deaths and illnesses. Obtaining these data will be key for science to provide the information needed to help these countries adapt.

"We are thinking about these problems of climate change as something that the next generation will face," said Ana Maria Vicedo-Cabrera, the lead author of the paper. "It's something we are facing already.   We are throwing stones at ourselves."

That's in line with other research, which has found that climate change is already a disaster for human health. Older people are particularly vulnerable, with heat-related deaths for this age group increasing by about 54 percent between 2000 and 2018. Some areas of the planet are getting hit worse than others, with extreme conditions happening even more frequently than predicted.