The Increased Threat of Droughts from Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report[1], released in August 2021, was a strong wake-up call to the world on the growing impacts of climate change. This report, summarizing the work of thousands of scientists and endorsed by governments across the globe, highlighted the growing threat of droughts, and the likely increase in both intensity and frequency of these events going forward. The need for smarter, more effective drought management, could not be urgent. Drought management is a critical component of providing water security and addressing water scarcity. It relates strongly to the delivery of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal Six (SDG 6) related to clean water and sanitation[2] as well as the UN’s International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction[3]. Indeed, political leaders from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region consider water shocks as their greatest existential threat and the one for which they are the least prepared[4].

Integrated Drought Risk Management Programme

The Integrated Drought Risk Management Programme[5] provides an organizational platform for applied drought risk management activities in policy, research, and development globally. It promotes[6] a “three pillars” approach that incorporates:

1) Drought monitoring and early warning;

2) Impact and vulnerability assessments; and

3) Mitigation, preparedness, and response planning.

MENA Drought project – the Three Pillars Approach in Practice

The International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has applied the three pillars approach through the MENA drought project[7] in Morocco, Jordan, and Lebanon. In this project, IWMI has supported national agencies to develop and run operationally a drought monitoring and early warning system including seasonal forecasting. This system focuses on agricultural drought – particularly for rainfed cereals and rangelands – as the priority determined through participatory assessments of drought monitoring and management needs[8] as well as studies of drought impacts and vulnerability.

In each country, this early warning system is institutionalized at a technical level within inter-agency drought technical committees, and at a bureaucratic (rather than political) decision-making level through inter-ministerial development of comprehensive Drought Action Plans. These Plans include tiered drought management responses tied to drought early warning system thresholds of severity.

Shifting from Drought Crisis Response to Proactive Drought Risk Management

Through iterative and collaborative technical and policy planning processes, the national agencies have begun to shift from a reactive drought crisis response paradigm towards a proactive and preparedness-focused risk management paradigm. Making this shift has been difficult due to underlying institutional and nested governance issues. However, the process to start this shift has helped officials to ameliorate issues by surfacing problems and enabling them to work through the best options to address those problems.

For example, early on, all stakeholders identified data-sharing as one of the core barriers to effective drought risk management and a generally widespread challenge throughout layers of government and between the government and private sector. Therefore, the Drought Action Plans incorporate straightforward inter-ministerial data sharing mechanisms. Indeed, some agencies have now started public information-sharing from the drought monitoring system, such as the Moroccan Ministry of Agriculture’s open publication of the monthly drought monitoring maps[9].  In this small but important way, the institutional processes undertaken to improve drought risk management can have wider governance and public-private engagement benefits beyond the immediate thematic area and economic sectors directly involved.

Likewise, the technical development required for the operational production of the drought monitoring and early warning systems establish a solid evidence and modelling base[10] on which to build for wider assessments of water, food, and climate nexus issues. For example, the evidence of drought history supports hazard mapping, which, in conjunction with agricultural and socio-economic data, is a key component in the assessment of likely food security hotspots now and, when combined with climate change projections, in the future. Also, the drought monitoring and/or seasonal forecasting modelling outputs could be used to force crop growth models to provide agricultural production scenario analyses and support national-level importation and financial planning regimes.   

Conclusion

The benefits of shifting to proactive drought risk management paradigms are clear but incredibly challenging to quantify[11]. Given the political sensitivity of drought management – any government support or payouts must be allocated in some way – it is imperative to facilitate rapid but robust decision-making through the production of sound supporting evidence that feeds into a clear policy and/or planning framework. Delivering this effectively requires collaborative and iterative approaches that are time-consuming because a wide range of actors are affected by drought and drought management, and the relevant socio-environmental systems are complex. IWMI and its partners are ready to support governments across MENA and the world to strengthen and empower their drought management capabilities and effectiveness, to ensure greater protection for their communities and economies from these devastating events.

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