Droughts of the 21st century are characterized by hotter temperatures, greater spatial extent, and longer duration. Reductions in water available to natural systems are increasingly exacerbated by human water use. This situation leads to ecological impacts from drought that ripple through human communities that depend on those ecosystems for critical goods and services. Despite the high costs to both nature and people, current drought research, management, and policy perspectives often fail to evaluate how drought affects ecosystems and the “natural capital” they provide to human communities. This project will provide a foundation of understanding ecological drought vulnerability to support participatory planning processes that integrate ecological drought. The team will produce integrated science products to improve our understanding of how drought indices, landscape context, ecological condition, and human water use relate to ecological thresholds. This will allow natural resource managers and drought planners to better anticipate ecological impacts and downstream effects on human communities.

This project will take an interdisciplinary approach to improve public health understanding of drought early warning and planning to reduce negative health impacts on at-risk populations in the United States. Health departments and healthcare professionals need reliable information to effectively prepare and warn constituents of pending natural and biological threats. Public health guidance documents and other tools are available for officials to help address drought, but these materials lack effectiveness if the linkages between drought and health are not fully understood. The project will analyze multiple drought indices to identify potential regional health outcomes. The findings will benefit public health professionals or emergency planners by showing utility for certain drought indicators in predicting health outcomes and enable the production of specialized messaging for at-risk populations.

One of the challenges facing drought preparedness is how to refine linkages between drought indicators and drought impacts across multiple sectors and to identify triggers and thresholds for drought response. This is particularly challenging in the western U.S., where extensive water storage and conveyance systems help mitigate local drought conditions. In these settings, current indicators of drought hazard—which focus on local supply conditions—may have limited connection with actual water scarcity. This project seeks to develop a methodology for evaluating impacts in water and land use sectors in regions that have extensive water storage and conveyance systems.