Australian farmers in some areas have been living with drought conditions for over ten years. Though a ten-year drought which affected Eastern and Southern parts of the country was declared over in April 2012, drought conditions began to develop less than a year later in the North and East.

2013 was the hottest year since records began in Australia, where figures show there has been a marked decrease in rainfall since the mid-1990s.

Forecasts from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology reveal there are no rains on the horizon that would ease drought-stricken areas. Meteorologists have warned that Eastern and Northern coastal parts of the country are likely to experience below-average rainfall until the end of the year.

The latest drought report from the Bureau revealed "August rainfall was well-below-average across southern Australia," and even above average rainfall in New South Wales, Queensland and along the East Coast "was not sufficient to cause dramatic change" to drought conditions.

The lack of adequate rainfall, and Western Australia's sixth-driest August on record, mean Southern and Western parts of the country continue to face "deficiencies." The Bureau's drought update revealed rainfall deficiencies have worsened and spread further in Victoria; otherwise the picture remains relatively unchanged from 2012, according to the meteorology agency.

In Queensland, a large number of Shires have slipped into states of drought since 2012, though the government has unveiled a $10 million (£5.4m) assistance package to help affected farmers.

Australian news agency ABC has recently spoken to Australian farmers about their experiences living through drought (the page on farmers' experiences are available here). Ben Callcott told the broadcaster, "This drought is different because people don't see a way back. Profitability was eroded many years ago and the industry has limped along on the back of cash reserves, cost cutting and equity ever since. That process is very nearly at an end. The capacity to endure further losses does not exist."

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 Claire Kapernick added, "This is as bad as previous droughts, but the heightened damage/stress is that it has come on the heels of being wiped out in the 2013 floods so we are financially stretched to breaking-point."

Australia's cycle of drought, and the bleak long-term forecast for the country's Eastern regions come on the heels of serious drought's in other major agricultural regions around the world, from China, where a lack of rainfall in northern crop-producing provinces has led authorities to truck in water supplies from the South, and where water availability has been slashed in the metropolises of Shanghai and Beijing, to California, where the majority of the United States' fruit and nut crops are grown, but where several years of drought and poor water management are now taking their toll.    

Droughts linked to climate change

Late last month, a slew of scientific studies linked the droughts in Australia and California, and heat-waves elsewhere, to climate change.

In one study, researchers from California's Stanford University used computer modelling of greenhouse gas emissions to show that pollution has played a large part in the State's drought, which is so severe California governor Jerry Brown has declared a state of emergency and listed the entire coastal state as a natural disaster area.  

In Australia, scientists from the University of New South Wales said five separate studies have shown that the record-breaking conditions seen in the country would be "virtually impossible without the influence of human-caused global warming."

Dr Markus Donat, who was part of a team assessing research which appeared in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, commented on the sweltering 2013 weather, which broke national records for hottest day, hottest month, hottest spring and hottest summer ever recorded. The team explained that Australia's seemingly exceptional 2013 weather is "just the latest peak in a trend over the observational record" which has seen more bushfires, warming of oceans around Australia, movements of tropical species into more temperate zones and the shift of rains "away from [the] most important agricultural zones."

Dr Donat said, "When it comes to what helped cause our hottest year on record, human-caused climate change is no longer a prime suspect, it is the guilty party. Too often we talk about climate change impacts as if they are far in the future. This research shows they are here, now."

One of the papers' authors said this is the first time a specific weather event has been conclusively linked to the effects of climate change.

Despite the fact that the country has had regions in drought almost since the turn of the millennium, and the mounting evidence that anthropocentric climate change (that which is caused by human activity) is exacerbating drought phenomena, the Australian government did not send a high level delegation to last week's UN Climate Summit in New York.

Professor David Karoly, who authored one of the papers, told the Sydney Morning Herald, "The Prime Minister last year said that studies hadn't been done and the CSIRO cautioned against attributing individual extreme weather events to climate change. Now the studies have been done and the results are very clear."

What does a changing climate mean for the UK?

According to scientists in the field of attribution (which looks at extreme weather events and attempts to establish whether they are the result of climate change), droughts and heat-waves are easier to link back to humans' effects on the planet than severe storms and heavy rains.

In recent years, the UK has been subjected to several bouts of extreme and unsettled weather, from the summer deluges of 2012, which sparked flooding and led to the UK becoming a net importer of wheat, to mild winters, which have led to high levels of crop pests, and record high summer temperatures in 2013, which came after the coolest spring since records began and was followed by the wettest winter.

A further study from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society suggests that, whilst the picture is less clear cut than in Australia, human activity almost certainly played a "substantial part" in engineering the heat-wave that hit Western Europe in summer 2013.

Professor Rowan Sutton, lead author on the new paper, told the Carbon Brief, "Climate change has increased the odds of hot summers in the UK. Summer 2013 was a good example, and Britain should expect more hot summers in the future, although not every year."

Although the UK has a notoriously complex weather system, Met Office meteorologists have said that shifting rainfall patterns in Britain mean we are likely to receive more rainfall, but in fewer, more intense bursts as climate change progresses, and a number of studies have shown average temperatures are likely to rise.   

The outlook for Britain is not yet clear; it remains to be seen whether climate change will translate into drier summers, or more deluges and heavy flooding. For areas that are already dry, such as Eastern Australia and California, the prospect of hotter temperatures and less rainfall (combined in many cases with dwindling groundwater reserves) is a bleak one.

Commenting on the situation many Australians face, Dr Sarah Perkins, who was involved with the University of New South Wales study said, "The most striking aspect of the extreme heat of 2013 and its impacts is that this is only at the very beginning of the time when we are expected to experience the first impacts of human-caused climate change.

"If we continue to put carbon into our atmosphere at the currently accelerating rate, years like 2013 will quickly be considered normal and the impacts of future extremes will be well beyond anything modern society has experienced."