Globally, droughts are increasing and disrupt the livelihoods and lives of people everywhere. Our UNU experts Davide Cotti, Edward Sparkes and Michael Hagenlocher contributed their expertise to the World Drought Atlas as lead authors, together with other UNU-EHS colleagues as contributors. The Atlas is a joint publication by the EU and UNCCD, in collaboration with UNU-EHS and other partners. We sat down with Davide and Edward to learn more.
What are droughts, and what makes drought risks so complex?
Droughts are often misunderstood. While they are natural hazards, their impacts are significantly shaped by our own actions and choices, such as how we manage our water resources. Known as “creeping hazards”, droughts often build up gradually, making them harder to monitor. They can and do have disastrous consequences, including serious disruptions to essential systems like water supply and agriculture. This slow build-up leading to major impacts makes drought risks particularly challenging to manage, also because they can have global effects due to the interconnected nature of our systems and societies.
A drought in one region can disrupt essential resources and services globally, even in areas with sufficient rainfall. For example, droughts in food-producing regions can affect food security elsewhere, while a drought in Taiwan once disrupted global chip production – a very specialized industry critical to global markets. Key transportation waterways such as the Panama Canal rely on freshwater and can also be impacted by droughts, leading to economic and industrial consequences. Vulnerable populations, such as the isolated communities in the Amazon dependent on water transport, may even face immediate challenges. These interconnected impacts show how droughts often have far-reaching, complex consequences beyond the drought’s geographic boundaries. In the Atlas, we offer an overview of these risks and the conceptual tools to unpack their complexity.
How can we adapt to drought risks on regional, national and global levels, given their interconnected nature?
In the Atlas, we also talk about drought risk management and adaptation. This requires addressing current risks while preparing for future ones, especially because climate change intensifies droughts in many regions. Since droughts affect various sectors differently, solutions must be tailored and interconnected to minimize trade-offs. For example, improving water systems for agriculture should not create burdens and water shortages for other sectors. You need to think of solutions in a similar way as we think of risks: systemically.
The part of the Atlas that focuses on managing and adapting to drought risks therefore takes a systemic approach. It emphasizes anticipatory measures such as early warning systems and long-term strategies like climate-smart agriculture, resilient water infrastructure and land degradation neutrality, which means that we should not extract more from the land than we give back. It presents twelve broad drought risk management and adaptation measures, emphasizing that when implemented with interconnections in mind, they can create positive knock-on effects across sectors. For instance, implementing an agricultural measure might also improve water supply.
Reactive responses, such as emergency aid, address immediate impacts but fail to mitigate future risks. Proactive measures reduce risks before droughts occur, while prospective approaches focus on avoiding the creation of new risks, for example through shifting to climate-smart agricultural systems. Other examples include investing in sustainable infrastructure and land management practices. In the Atlas, these ideas are framed within tools like the Adaptation Pathways Framework, which promotes collaborative solutions at all levels: from community water management to international policy. The pathways framework shows how measures can work in combination with each other and create synergies across sectors, enhancing resilience to increasing systemic drought risks.
A systemic risk management approach recognizes the interconnected nature of droughts and other risks, such as floods. By addressing shared drivers of risk in particular, such as poor resource management, systemic solutions can be developed to tackle multiple risks at once.
Can you elaborate on the success stories in the Atlas?
The Atlas has a subchapter on success stories with different examples of effective drought risk management from around the globe. A good case to zoom in on takes place in Maharashtra, India, where an NGO named WOTR addressed groundwater overextraction by educating communities on sustainable practices and introducing water-efficient farming and less water-intensive crops. By training mostly women and girls, the programme reached over 73,000 households, creating a ripple effect of shared knowledge.
With the wide range of solutions the Atlas offers, we highlight how synergies can be created between different measures to bring people, communities and sectors together, to make sure that we are safe in a world with increasing drought risks.
