Water shortages in parts of the world in the next 25 years will pose the single greatest threat to food production and human health, according to a study financed by the United States and Japan. At a time when 1.3 billion people worldwide have no access to clean water, it also could become a key issue in conflicts, warns the report's author, World Bank vice president and agriculture expert Ismail Serageldin. In all, a quarter of the world's population is expected to face severe water scarcity in the next 25 years, even during years of average rainfall, the group estimates.

This decade has been the warmest of the millennium, American scientists said recently. Last year was the hottest in 600 years. The researchers from the universities of Massachusetts and Arizona studied a mass of data, including tree ring records from North America, Scandinavia, northern Russia, Tasmania, Argentina, Morocco and France. They also studied ice cores from Greenland and the Andes and other natural indicators of climate. Computer analysis enabled them to provide a reconstruction of yearly temperature going back to the year 1000 AD.

"Our results show that significant changes have occurred," Dr. Michael Mann, of Massachusetts, said in Geophysical Research Letters. "Temperatures in the latter 20th century have been exceptionally warm compared with the preceding 900 years. Although substantial uncertainties exist in the estimates, these are nonetheless startling revelations."

The researchers' 1,000-year reconstruction shows that temperatures dropped by an average of 0.02 Celsius per century before the 20th century. "The slow, moderate, long-term cooling trend makes the warming of the late 20th century even more dramatic," Dr. Mann said. "The abruptness of the recent warming is a potential cause for concern."

China is experiencing its worst drought in more than a decade, with 19 million residents lacking drinking water and more than 21.5 million acres of farmland parched. The country has received very little rainfall since last September. The drought immediately followed one of the worst summer flooding seasons on record last year.

You know it's dry when Sunbelt retirees start watering the cactus. When a wall of wildfire 10 miles wide blackens a swath of Nebraska prairie the size of Rhode Island, stampeding cattle and forcing the midnight evacuation of a ranching town.

And this was supposed to be an easy year. After all, the record El Niņo of 1998 is long gone. However, scientists say 1999 is shaping up to be another year of unpredictable, destructive weather conditions.

Portions of the U.S. South and Midwest are being strangled by a spotty but tenacious drought that has been gripping parts of the nation for several months, and no one is certain how much worse the drought will get.

Studies of climate trends spanning the past 10 centuries indicate that immediately following El Niņo episodes, North America has periodically suffered cataclysmic droughts and wildfires that would make the Dust Bowl look lush.

We're overdue, scientists warn. And its impacts could be exaggerated by record high temperatures in the 1990s that some believe are the result of global warming caused by human activities.

"We're heading into a very, very dangerous situation," said University of Arizona tree ring expert Tom Swetnam. "It's really off the scale."

Humans have destroyed more than 30 percent of the natural world since 1970, with serious depletion of the forest, freshwater and marine systems on which life depends.

Consumption pressure from increasing affluence has doubled in the past 25 years and continues to accelerate, according to a ground-breaking report from the World Wide Fund for Nature, the New Economics Foundation, and the World Conservation Monitoring Center at Cambridge.

"Time is running out for us to change the way we live if we are to leave future generations a living planet," Nick Mabey, WWF’s economic policy officer, said. "We knew it was bad, but until we did this report we did not realize how bad."

The people of Taiwan, the United States and Singapore are singled out as the world’s most voracious consumers. The average North American resident consumes fives times as much as an African and three times as much as an Asian.

People could help save the planet and save themselves money through reducing waste, energy efficiency, using water sparingly and not contaminating it, and by avoiding unnecessary trips in vehicles.

Nearly 1.4 million people are going hungry in Vietnam because of floods and drought over the past few months. Most of those affected were in northern and central Vietnam. Some 840,000 people have been left destitute in 15 provinces, according to a Labor Ministry study, the People's Army newspaper reported. The government has allocated $2.7 million to help those affected. Drought now has set in for central and northern Vietnam as rainfall declines. Water levels in rivers and reservoirs are low. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development has estimated that nearly 1.8 million people in northern and central Vietnam are short of potable water. (AP)