Reconciling Drought Vulnerability Assessment Using a Convergent Approach: Application to Water Security in the Elqui River Basin, North-Central Chile

Jorge Núñez,Abraham Vergara,Christine Metzkes,Gabriel Mancilla,Camila Leyton,Dagoberto Bettancourt

doi:10.3390/w9080589

Abstract

Drought has been, is and most likely will remain one of the most significant socio-natural disasters affecting society and the environment worldwide. One priority objective in the adoption of national drought policies is to promote standardized approaches to vulnerability assessment. To reach this objective, however, there is a need to address the noticeable lack of reconciliation between the two major epistemic frameworks that have been used to determine who is vulnerable and why: the so-called outcome and contextual frameworks. This study presents a novel procedure called the convergent approach to assess drought vulnerability under an integral framework. The procedure has been applied to the study of the vulnerability of water security to drought in water-use sectors in a basin located in north-central Chile. The study is justified by the role that drought plays as the major threat to water security in a context of global water crisis. The results show that the convergent approach outperforms traditional procedures such as those based on composite indicators, showing sound robustness and reaching sufficient levels of reliability and validity. The potential expansion of this approach to other applications, such as those related to global estimations of vulnerability to drought, is also discussed.

Highlights

Drought has been, is, and most likely will continue to be one of the most significant socio-natural disasters affecting society and the environment worldwide. there has been ongoing discussion regarding the occurrence, trends and uncertainty in the frequency of droughts globally [1,2,3,4], an objective fact is that this phenomenon caused more than half of the deaths associated with natural disasters worldwide during the 20th century and, after floods, was the natural disaster with the second-greatest human impact [5,6]
International concern about the global impact of drought motivated the organization, in 2013, of a High-Level Meeting on National Drought Policy (HMNDP), organized in a joint effort by
The convergent approach is proposed as a response to the recent call to promote standard approaches to vulnerability and impact assessment, an issue that is gaining importance in both science and policy to the extent that it is considered urgent matter

Summary

Introduction

Drought has been, is, and most likely will continue to be one of the most significant socio-natural disasters affecting society and the environment worldwide. there has been ongoing discussion regarding the occurrence, trends and uncertainty in the frequency of droughts globally [1,2,3,4], an objective fact is that this phenomenon caused more than half of the deaths associated with natural disasters worldwide during the 20th century and, after floods, was the natural disaster with the second-greatest human impact [5,6]. Drought has been, is, and most likely will continue to be one of the most significant socio-natural disasters affecting society and the environment worldwide. According to the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction [7], 50.5 million people were affected by drought worldwide in 2015 alone. Recommendations from the perspectives of policy and science were developed. In the latter case, one of the five key elements through which science can support a national drought management policy consists of “Promoting standard approaches to vulnerability and impact assessment” [9], an issue that is gaining importance in both science and policy-making and has even been classified as an urgent matter [6]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion