Funding Opportunities
NIDIS and its partners offer a variety of funding opportunities related to drought early warning research across many sectors and fields, including science, education, and technology.
Competitive Funding Opportunities
These featured competitive funding opportunities support advancing drought early warning across a variety of sectors and are offered by NIDIS and partnering agencies and organizations.
NIDIS's Coping with Drought funding competition supports research that assesses impacts of drought on agriculture, ecosystems, and water resources and develops decision support tools for regional, state, and local use.
The next Coping with Drought competition is scheduled for the summer of 2021.
Part of NOAA's Climate Program Office, the Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) Program hosts annual funding competitions soliciting proposals on climate-related topics. NIDIS supports drought-focused funding competitions through MAPP, focusing on improving drought monitoring and prediction systems.
This year's MAPP competitions focus on advancing climate monitoring and model diagnostic activities. Drought-focused competitions will be available in future years.
The Tribal Resilience Program (TRP) is an annual awards program that is designed to reinforce preparedness through tribally-designed resilience training, adaptation planning, vulnerability assessments, supplemental monitoring, capacity building, and youth engagement. TRP's focus lies primarily on impacts associated with harmful environmental trends on tribal and treaty trust resources, economies, infrastructure, and human health and safety.
The FY 2020 deadline for applications was March 2, 2020. View the FY 2020 Award Summary.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation's Drought Response Program supports a proactive approach to drought by providing assistance to water managers to develop and update comprehensive drought plans and implement projects that will build long-term resiliency to drought.
This year's deadline for applications was January 6, 2021. View the FY 2021 Drought Contingency Planning FOA.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency's (FEMA's) Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) helps communities enact hazard mitigation measures that reduce the risk of loss of life and property from future disasters.
Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) is a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) pre-disaster hazard mitigation program that supports states, local communities, tribal nations, and territories as they undertake hazard mitigation projects reducing the risks they face from disasters and natural hazards.
Featured FY 2020 Coping with Drought Research
Since 2012, NIDIS has funded more than 80 grants for research projects advancing drought early warning across a variety of sectors through the Coping with Drought Initiative and the Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) Program's funding competitions, in addition to supporting other drought research across sectors and regions. Below are examples of research NIDIS is currently supporting through the FY 2020 Coping with Drought funding competition. View all FY 2020 Coping with Drought awardees.

Visualizing ecological drought impacts, vulnerabilities, and drivers to inform deliberate decision-making
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.

Evaluation of Drought Indicators for Improved Decision-Making in Public Health and Emergency Preparedness: Reducing Drought’s Burden on Health
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.

Linking Indicators of Drought Hazard to Multi-Sectoral Impacts: An Application to California
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.