The phrase "dire impact" is correct and can be used in written English.
It is often used to describe a serious or devastating effect or consequence of something. Example: The hurricane had a dire impact on the coastal town, leaving behind a path of destruction and displacement.
Judge Julia Gibbons, who chairs the federal judiciary's budget committee, also attested to sequestration's dire impact.
For too long, evidence of the dire impact of diesel emissions and other pollutants has been sidelined".
As the British Medical Association noted this week, this will have a dire impact on those children's health and wellbeing.
Conservationists say the emissions from burning up to 60m tonnes of coal a year would have a dire impact on efforts to limit global warming.
There have been warnings, however, that cuts to the social housing budget could have a dire impact on the private sector.
Simply selling buildings, merging departments with little in common and relocating offices to the outskirts of a city could have a dire impact on productivity and local economies.
Yet it's not as if the government itself doesn't recognise the dire impacts of climate change –particularly on developing countries.
"Where Do Old Cellphones Go to Die?," by Leyla Acaroglu (Sunday Review, May 5), called attention to the dire impacts that e-waste exports have on the environment and human health in developing countries.
"Among the many dire impacts, the cuts threaten the very existence of the Mars exploration program which has been one of the crown jewels of the agency's planetary exploration," wrote David J. Des Marais, a scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center in California and chairman of the group.
Apart from salinity and arsenic, drought has dire impacts on drinking water access and supply in the study area during the dry season (Abedin et al. 2012).
The findings also suggest that previous techniques using satellites to measure drought stress in rainforests may be missing dire impacts of a warming global climate, which many scientists believe will cause more droughts in those critical habitats.
