Identifying areas of high drought risk in southwest Western Australia

Abstract

Drought is an extremely serious natural hazard in Australia, associated with nancial hardship and damage to soils and vegetation. With droughts expected to become more frequent and more severe as climate change progresses, it is increasingly important to identify drought risk and assess communitylevel drought resilience at the appropriate spatial, temporal and administrative scale for decision-making.Here, we have used spatial multi-criteria analysis to identify regional priority areas for the implementation of drought resilience interventions or investment in southwest Western Australia (WA). This region is home to the WA grains industry, the largest agricultural contributor to the economy and one of the regions most impacted by climate change in Australia to date, experiencing consistent reduction in rainfall and recurrent drought over the last several decades. We modelled drought exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity for the region, incorporating spatially explicit climate, environmental, social and economic data, and produced a suite of priority areas maps, ground-truthed through a participatory mapping process.The maps highlight the northern and eastern wheatbelt as areas at high risk from drought, and have the potential to serve as a powerful tool for local-level drought resilience decision-making. Most of the data we used are publicly available, and the vulnerability framework applied allows for wide replication within and beyond southwest WA. 2020). The work presented here was undertaken as part of the larger Future Drought Fund Regional Drought Resilience Planning (RDRP) program in southwest WA (DPIRD 2021) and contributes towards Australia-wide work on this topic through the federal Future Drought Fund. Stakeholder engagement to ground-truth spatial priorities identi ed through desktop MCA focused on three sub-regions in the Great Southern, Mid West and Wheatbelt and included review workshops and participatory mapping processes. MethodsAnalyses and stakeholder engagement were conducted in 2021 and 2022. Data analysis for the MCA focused on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's South West Land Division forecasting area. Within this area, targeted stakeholder engagement was conducted in the three RDRP focus sub-regions in WA, namely the Great Southern, Mid West and Wheatbelt (Fig. 1). The Great Southern consortium focused on the Shires of Broomehill-