Less to Lose? Drought Impact and Vulnerability Assessment in Disadvantaged Regions

Caroline King-Okumu,Daniel Tsegai,Gwyn Rees,Rajendra Prasad Pandey

doi:10.3390/w12041136

Caroline King-Okumu, Daniel Tsegai + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/w12041136

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Abstract

Droughts hit the most vulnerable people the hardest. When this happens, everybody in the economy loses over the medium- to long-term. Proactive policies and planning based on vulnerability and risk assessments can reduce drought risk before the worst impacts occur. The aim of this article is to inform a global initiative, led by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), to mitigate the effects of drought on vulnerable ecosystems and communities. This is approached through a rapid review of experiences from selected nations and of the available literature documenting methodological approaches to assess drought impacts and vulnerability at the local level. The review finds that members of the most vulnerable communities can integrate available methods to assess drought risks to their land and ecosystem productivity, their livelihoods and their life-supporting hydrological systems. This integration of approaches helps to ensure inclusive assessments across communities and ecosystems. However, global economic assessments often still fail to connect to holistic consideration of vulnerability at a local scale. As a result, they routinely fall short of capturing the systemic effects of land and water management decisions that deepen vulnerability to droughts over time. To ensure proactive and inclusive drought risk mitigation, multiscale, systemic approaches to drought vulnerability and risk assessment can be further reinforced at a global level.

Highlights

Droughts and water scarcity hit hardest where people are least able to adapt [1,2,3]
Extensive guidance is available for assessments of drought impact on national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in developing countries [4]
The global and regional costs of continued drought crises and their interaction with other threats may be more than the sum of the costs of impacts occurring within individual countries

Summary

Introduction

Droughts and water scarcity hit hardest where people are least able to adapt [1,2,3]. Extensive guidance is available for assessments of drought impact on national Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in developing countries [4]. This is rarely applied, leaving the available assessments incomplete and susceptible to risks of exacerbating inequality [5]. Losses that are disastrous for vulnerable people remain obscured or appear relatively insignificant to national and international actors. This is because most national accounting systems fail to recognize the contributions that vulnerable communities and individuals make to the formal and informal national economies. As a result of these problems, the avoidable costs of drought, degradation and desertification are underestimated globally, and simple preventive actions are routinely overlooked, deprioritized and underfunded [6]

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