It's not all about drought: What “drought impacts” monitoring can reveal

David W Walker (1) , Juliana Lima Oliveira (2) , Louise Cavalcante (1) , Sarra Kchouk (1) , Germano Ribeiro Neto (1) , Lieke A Melsen (1) , Francisco Bergson P Fernandes (3) , Veronica Mitroi (4, 5, 6) , Rubens S Gondim (7) , Eduardo Sávio Passos Rodrigues Martins (8, 2) , Pieter R van Oel (1)

1 WUR - Wageningen University and Research [Wageningen]
2 FUNCEME - Fundação Cearense de Meteorologia e Recursos Hídricos
3 LCMCP-MATBIO - Matériaux et Biologie
4 Cirad-ES - Département Environnements et Sociétés
5 iEES Paris - Institut d'écologie et des sciences de l'environnement de Paris
6 UMR G-EAU - Gestion de l'Eau, Acteurs, Usages
7 Embrapa - Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation
8 UFC - Universidade Federal do Ceará = Federal University of Ceará

Drought impacts monitoring has been called the missing piece in drought assessment. The potential to improve drought management is high but uncertain due to rare analyses of impacts datasets, predominantly because there are few impacts monitoring programmes to generate the datasets. Drought impacts monitoring is conducted on the ground in much of Brazil by local observers at monthly and municipality scale to support the Brazilian Drought Monitor. In Ceara state, within drought-prone semiarid northeast Brazil, over 3600 drought impacts reports were completed by agricultural extension officers from 2019 to 2022. We investigated, through manual coding and observer interviews, the reported drought impacts and impact drivers. Analysis provided a catalogue of the experienced impacts and showed that impacts still occur, and are often normalised, during non-drought periods, sometimes as lingering effects of previous droughts. The impact drivers were predominantly non-extreme hydrometeorological conditions or a result of socio-technical vulnerabilities such as insufficient water infrastructure. The normalisation of "impacts" included, in particular: a generally accepted high level of crop losses and consistently low reservoir levels around which the agricultural and domestic systems are adapted. Conventional drought indices often did not align with experienced impact severity, highlighting the limitations of relying solely on these indices for emergency response. Continual impacts monitoring could be extremely valuable anywhere in the world for identifying vulnerabilities and informing proactive measures to reduce drought and other hazard risk, in addition to guiding targeted mitigation efforts.

Keywords: Impact drivers; Vulnerability; Risk reduction; Mitigation; Brazil

Domains: Environmental Sciences

David W Walker, Juliana Lima Oliveira, Louise Cavalcante, Sarra Kchouk, Germano Ribeiro Neto, et al.. It's not all about drought: What “drought impacts” monitoring can reveal. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 2024, 103, pp.104338. ⟨10.1016/j.ijdrr.2024.104338⟩. ⟨hal-04560921⟩