From Disaster Response to Risk Management

Droughts have significant environmental and socio-economic impacts in Australia. This emphasizes Australia's vulnerability to climate variability and limitations of adaptive capacity. Two drought indices are compared for their potential utility in resource management. The Rainfall Deciles-based Drought Index is a measure of rainfall deficiency while the Soil-Moisture Deciles-based Drought Index is a measure of soil-moisture deficiency attributed to rainfall and potential evaporation. Both indices were used to assess future drought events over Australia under global warming attributed to low and high greenhouse gas emission scenarios (SRES B1 and A1F1 respectively) for 30-year periods centred on 2030 and 2070. Projected consequential changes in rainfall and potential evaporation were based on results from the CCCma1 and Mk2 climate models, developed by the Canadian Climate Center and the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) respectively. A general increase in drought frequency associated with global warming was demonstrated by both indices for both climate models, except for the western part of Australia. Increases in the frequency of soil-moisture-based droughts are greater than increases in meteorological drought frequency. By 2030, soil-moisture-based drought frequency increases 20-40% over most of Australia with respect to 1975-2004 and up to 80% over the Indian Ocean and southeast coast catchments by 2070. Such increases in drought frequency would have major implications for natural resource management, water security planning, water demand management strategies, and drought relief payments.

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Institutions and policy processes: the means to the ends of adaptation

Dovers

Hezri

2010

WIREs Climate Change

238

156

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Institutions and institutional change are mentioned often but rarely specified in discussions of climate adaptation. Policy change is proposed, but the detail of policy processes less often discussed. Adaptation to increased climate change and variability will require policy interventions to change behaviors across multiple sectors, requiring policy processes constrained or enabled by institutional settings. Detailed discussion of how to redesign policy processes and institutions are especially rare at the crucial jurisdictional scales of national and sub-national policy and planning. We review coverage of policy and institutions in the adaptation literature and clarify key issues by drawing on the domains of public policy, institutional change, and sustainable development. The distinction between, but close dependencies among, institutions, institutional systems, organizations, policy processes, policy instruments, and management are emphasized. We propose that the climate policy literature has rapidly become large enough that a tendency of self-referencing has developed, and that insights can be gained from other areas. Within existing parameters of law, politics, and governance, options are identified that could embed considerations of climate adaptation into policy processes and institutional systems, with focus on enabling cross-sectoral policy integration ('mainstreaming'), decision making under conditions of uncertainty, vertical ('cross-scale') policy coordination, issues of capacity and devolution, and policy evaluation and learning. The value of seeking lessons from past policy interventions and from cognate policy sectors is explored .

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From Disaster Response to Risk Management

Cited by 23 publications

References 124 publications

Drought Policy and Management

Drought Policy and Management

Comparison of suitable drought indices for climate change impacts assessment over Australia towards resource management

Institutions and policy processes: the means to the ends of adaptation

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