Roger PULWARTY, NOAA, United States
Droughts have deep, widespread and underestimated impacts on societies, ecosystems, and economies. The extensive impacts of drought are consistently underreported even though they can span thousands of square kilometres, cascade through systems and across timescales, and contribute to economic losses, food and water insecurity, and inequality. Recent widespread, severe, and multiyear droughts (e.g., in the U.S., Australia, Europe, Brazil, Syria, the Greater Horn of Africa, Russia and Mexico) have helped advance research to an awareness of drought as a globally-networked risk involving food, water, energy and in some cases national security. But droughts are not well-understood in all their dimensions. Simple model diagnostics do not adequately represent the multi-scale systemic nature of drought, drought risks and complexity of response. In advancing understanding and solutions to these challenges, the author co-led the very first UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Global Assessment Special Report (GAR) on Drought (2021), and with the forthcoming GAR 2022, outlined the systemic nature of droughts and their impacts on achievement of the Sendai Framework, the Paris agreement, and the Sustainable Development Goals. This presentation shows that traditional and existing approaches are consistently overwhelmed by the systemic and geographically diverse nature of risk, and so makes immediate the need for advancing approaches to prospectively as well as proactively manage drought-related risks in different contexts. These include:
Diagnosing the barriers and opportunities for understanding the complexity of drought in a changing climate
Deepening understanding of the links between drought and human securities (water, food, energy, conflict etc.)
Building understanding of the necessary knowledge development, enabling conditions and governance to overcome barriers and effectively address drought-related systemic risks at regional, national and international scales.
Mots clés : systemic risk|climate hazards|drought|risk reduction|governance
A103490RP