Tackling Growing Drought Risks—The Need for a Systemic Perspective

Abstract

In the last few years, the world has experienced numerous extreme droughts with adverse direct, cascading, and systemic impacts. Despite more frequent and severe events, drought risk assessment is still incipient compared to that of other meteorological and climate hazards. This is mainly due to the complexity of drought, the high level of uncertainties in its analysis, and the lack of community agreement on a common framework to tackle the problem. Here, we outline that to effectively assess and manage drought risks, a systemic perspective is needed. We propose a novel drought risk framework that highlights the systemic nature of drought risks, and show its operationalization using the example of the 2022 drought in Europe. This research emphasizes that solutions to tackle growing drought risks should not only consider the underlying drivers of drought risks for different sectors, systems or regions, but also be based on an understanding of sector/system interdependencies, feedbacks, dynamics, compounding and concurring hazards, as well as possible tipping points and globally and/or regionally networked risks.

Uncovering the Dynamics of Multi‐Sector Impacts of Hydrological Extremes: A Methods Overview

“…They can further provide baseline information for evaluating whether adaptation measures effectively reduce loss and damage. Spatio‐temporal impact data sets can also improve our understanding of risk drivers (Kellermann et al., 2020) and serve as ground truth information for impact‐based early warning systems (Hagenlocher et al., 2023; Hobeichi et al., 2022).…”