Drought Assessment in a Changing Climate: Priority Actions & Research Needs

Future research should embrace multidisciplinary approaches, incorporating indigenous research methods, embracing different worldviews, and hybrid knowledge frameworks to co-create new knowledge, while also considering data sovereignty and reciprocity.

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Building accurate and useful drought assessments could greatly benefit from a National Academies or similar study on our current understanding of drought and climate change, as a foundation for future research. Knowledge exchange across hazards, sectors,  and with the global drought community could accelerate learning in how to address non-stationarity across multiple hazards.

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Where past droughts may not be analogous to future drought, drought indicators should be consistently evaluated for quality and relevance when characterizing drought in a changing climate. This should include exploring emerging data science capabilities and how they can be used to improve drought assessment.

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Weather and climate models must be modernized through continued efforts to better represent land surface processes (e.g., evapotranspiration) and ensure accurate representation of global-scale drivers of drought—even given uncertainty in how these might change in a warming world.

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A unified framework is needed to define, identify, and quantify the drought-to-aridification continuum.  This will help delineate the differences between droughts—episodic events that may last multiple months, seasons, years, decades, centuries— and a permanent change toward a drier climate (aridification). 

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Climate change manifests differently across space and time and affects regions in unequal ways, and drought assessment should address regional differences. This includes identifying indicators and periods of reference that perform best for the region based on the goal of the assessment. This also recognizes that differences in economic sectors, cultural practices, ecosystems, and habitats create different experiences of drought impacts that need to be accounted for in assessments.

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Drought assessment in a changing climate requires accounting for non-stationarity in drought indicators. In addition, challenges that impact indicator performance must be addressed, including changes in extreme events, snowpack and melt; processes like evapotranspiration and primary productivity due to climate change; as well as work to better understand drought recovery.  

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Current precipitation-based metrics may show drought improvement when, in reality, precipitation has fallen too quickly and has run off instead of infiltrating the soil. Precipitation metrics that can more accurately portray drought conditions are needed as precipitation variability (e.g., extreme events) increases and patterns (e.g., seasonality) change.

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Drought assessments are complicated by shifts, or potential shifts, in water demand from physical processes (e.g., evapotranspiration) and human water use. Improved understanding and monitoring of changes in water availability and shifts in demand across sectors would provide better insight for future water management. 

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Climate change not only shifts the physical nature of a drought, but also the ways drought impacts sectors and communities. Climate change may also increase the urgency people have in responding to or adapting to drought. Understanding how human behavior can mitigate or exacerbate how impacts are felt and linking this to drought indicators can inform thresholds for planning and response. 

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Assessing drought risk not only considers the probability or likelihood of an event, but also the harmful impacts of the event to specific individuals, communities, and systems. Drought assessment should acknowledge and account for non-stationarity in both the biophysical and human contexts, identify and quantify the cost of drought across social-ecological systems, and link this information to resource management decisions. 

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The way that drought is assessed and how drought metrics incorporate non-stationarity has policy implications. Policy research needs to examine these implications and how science can inform future policies and programs.

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Ultimately, decision-makers need access to appropriate information to inform proactive decision-making based on the best available knowledge and information. The need to link improvements in drought assessment to planning and decision making becomes more relevant, and urgent, given the complexity that non-stationarity brings to this challenge. 

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Non-stationarity adds to the complexity of communication challenges and necessitates an increased focus on knowledge exchange. This includes communicating confidence and/or uncertainty in drought assessments in a way that informs decision-making. 

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