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  • Perspective
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Toward impact-based monitoring of drought and its cascading hazards

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 4, pages 582–595 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Growth in satellite observations and modelling capabilities has transformed drought monitoring, offering near-real-time information. However, current monitoring efforts focus on hazards rather than impacts, and are further disconnected from drought-related compound or cascading hazards such as heatwaves, wildfires, floods and debris flows. In this Perspective, we advocate for impact-based drought monitoring and integration with broader drought-related hazards. Impact-based monitoring will go beyond top-down hazard information, linking drought to physical or societal impacts such as crop yield, food availability, energy generation or unemployment. This approach, specifically forecasts of drought event impacts, would accordingly benefit multiple stakeholders involved in drought planning, and risk and response management, with clear benefits for food and water security. Yet adoption and implementation is hindered by the absence of consistent drought impact data, limited information on local factors affecting water availability (including water demand, transfer and withdrawal), and impact assessment models being disconnected from drought monitoring tools. Implementation of impact-based drought monitoring thus requires the use of newly available remote sensors, the availability of large volumes of standardized data across drought-related fields, and the adoption of artificial intelligence to extract and synthesize physical and societal drought impacts.

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Fig. 1: Drought monitoring timeline.
Fig. 2: The European drought of 2003.
Fig. 3: Snow drought examples.
Fig. 4: Drought-related processes and cascading hazards.
Fig. 5: Snow drought impacts on the agriculture sector.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grants NA19OAR4310294, National Science Foundation (NSF) grant OAC-1931335, NAS Agreement 2000013232 and NASA Award NNX15AC27G. A.G.P. was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological & Environmental Research (BER), Regional and Global Model Analysis (RGMA) component of the Earth and Environmental System Modeling Program under award number DE-SC0022070 and NSF IA 1947282 and by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which is a major facility sponsored by the NSF under Cooperative Agreement no. 1852977. P.J.W. received support from the MYRIAD-EU project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 101003276. A.M. was supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) award # 1653841.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Amir AghaKouchak, Laurie S. Huning, Charlotte A. Love, Annika Hjelmstad, Yunxia Zhao & Steven J. Davis

  2. Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

    Amir AghaKouchak, Shakil Jiwa & Steven J. Davis

  3. Department of Civil Engineering and Construction Engineering Management, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA

    Laurie S. Huning

  4. Department of Civil Engineering, Boise State University, Boise, ID, USA

    Mojtaba Sadegh

  5. College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yue Qin

  6. Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Praha - Suchdol, Czech Republic

    Yannis Markonis & Martin Hanel

  7. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Farshid Vahedifard

  8. Glenn Department of Civil Engineering, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, USA

    Ashok Mishra

  9. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, USA

    Ali Mehran

  10. Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    Renee Obringer

  11. Department of Computer Science, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Shrideep Pallickara

  12. Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

    Angeline G. Pendergrass

  13. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA

    Angeline G. Pendergrass

  14. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

    Mazdak Arabi

  15. Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Philip J. Ward

  16. Deltares, Delft, The Netherlands

    Philip J. Ward

  17. National Drought Mitigation Center, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Mark Svoboda

  18. School of Natural Resources, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA

    Mark Svoboda

  19. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Physical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, CO, USA

    Roger Pulwarty

  20. Section Hydrology, GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany

    Heidi Kreibich

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  1. Amir AghaKouchak
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Contributions

A.A. conceived and designed the article and prepared the first draft. M.Sadegh, A.G.P., A.M., L.S.H. and C.A.L. participated in initial discussions and provided feedback on the draft. L.H., M.Sadegh, A. Mehran, A. Mishra, Y.Q., Y.M., M.A., R.O., F.V. and S.P. contributed materials or figures for the first draft. C.A.L., Y.Z., S.J., A.H., S.J.D., H.K., P.J.W., M.H., M.Svoboda, and R.P. edited and/or offered comments and suggestions throughout the process.

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Correspondence to Amir AghaKouchak.

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Nature Reviews Earth and Environment thanks Jianjun Wu, Vimal Mishra and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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AghaKouchak, A., Huning, L.S., Sadegh, M. et al. Toward impact-based monitoring of drought and its cascading hazards. Nat Rev Earth Environ 4, 582–595 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-023-00457-2

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