Annual Progress Report of the European and Global Drought Observatories

With this report, the reader finds an overview of the changes, upgrades and new features created in the European Drought Observatory (EDO) and the Global Drought Observatory (GDO) and made in 2019. The year proved relatively quiet concerning drought events in Europe; the subcontinent was only affected in the Baltics, although fires broke out vigorously in the Balkans, Spain and Russia. Thanks to the recent juvenile concern with regard to the heating up of the climate, drought events and forest fires drew more public-attention. Our reaction upon this concern in the Global Drought Observatory is the development of a new group of data, which we call Drought Mitigation. With more people genuinely concerned in the effect of our alternation of the properties of the lower atmosphere, we take up the task to provide guidelines for repair and adaptation. Higher temperatures imply that air depletes more vapour from vegetation and soil, leading to more intense droughts or floods. Consient management of our fresh water resources and massive tree planting are measures that can have significant impact on the effects of a Drought, Forest Fires or also Flood events. Therefore, we started with including the results of the often-cited research result regarding reforestation potential of the Crowther Lab as a layer in the Global Drought Observatory. We completed our work with enriching data describing dams with data regarding the location, name and quantitative characteristics of dams as an additional layer. We worked on the integration of the GRACE Dataset, which gives us an actualized satellite born, insight in the depletion of groundwater resources. We created a new index, alerting drought impacts on protected wetlands. Droughts events in these areas might affect rare species living in these protected wetlands, thus creating a link to the biodiversity crisis. The drought alerting mechanism we developed thus far were human centred. With this new index and with the Crowther Lab reforestation inventory we hope to correct this one species view of the past, learning to share our territory with all species, also during hard times of a drought disaster. With these additions, we hope that EDO and GDO will give you a better overview of the impacts of drought events, not only for our economy but also for our shared ecosystems and their services to us. Finally note that we engage in a project to export EDO and GDO knowledge and software to African regional partners. Thus enabling them to set up drought observatories in Africa just as if we did for South- and Central America. Such a collaboration works both ways, we understand better the impacts of Drought events in their region and we learn from their practical skills with regard to make things work in a challenging environment, whilst we can give them working drought observatory software, practical manners to, almost, fully automate the filling and updating of the systems combined with our specific expertise on droughts build up in the last 12 years.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

Drought datasets

Drought monitoring is based on various indices: the standardized precipitation index (SPI), which shows the deviation from average precipitation and is therefore directly related to drought hazard, while additional indices monitor the status of soil moisture, vegetation, groundwater levels, etc. to assess the potential impacts of droughts. A method that combines different drought indices (SPI, soil moisture anomalies and fAPAR anomalies) is proposed in order to identify areas affected by agricultural drought and also areas with the potential to be affected. The method outcome is the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI) consisting in a classification scheme based in three drought impact levels ("Watch", "Warning" and "Alert"), corresponding to the different stages of the idealized agricultural drought cause-effect relationship. Two additional levels, "Partial recovery" and "Recovery", identify the stages of the vegetation recovery process.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

A new global database of meteorological drought events from 1951 to 2016

Study region: This study has three spatial scales: global (0.5°), macro-regional, and country scale. The database of drought events has specific entries for each macro-region and country. Study focus: We constructed a database of meteorological drought events from 1951 to 2016, now hosted by the Global Drought Observatory of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre. Events were detected at macro-regional and country scale based on the separate analysis of the Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) at different accumulation scales (from 3 to 72 months), using as input the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time Series datasets. The database includes approximately 4800 events based on SPEI-3 and 4500 based on SPI-3. Each event is described by its start and end date, duration, intensity, severity, peak, average and maximum area in drought, and a special score to classify 52 mega-droughts. New hydrological insights for the region under study: We derived trends in drought frequency and severity, separately for SPI and SPEI at a 12-month accumulation scale, which is usually related to hydrological droughts. Results show several drought hotspots in the last decades: Amazonia, southern South America, the Mediterranean region, most of Africa, north-eastern China and, to a lesser extent, central Asia and southern Australia. Over North America, central Europe, central Asia, and Australia, the recent progressive temperature increase outbalanced the increase in precipitation causing more frequent and severe droughts. Keywords: Climate change, Drought events, Global database, Meteorological drought, SPEI, SP

A new global database of meteorological drought events from 1951 to 2016

Study region This study has three spatial scales: global (0.5°), macro-regional, and country scale. The database of drought events has specific entries for each macro-region and country. Study Focus We constructed a database of meteorological drought events from 1951 to 2016, now hosted by the Global Drought Observatory of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. Events were detected at macro-regional and country scale based on the separate analysis of Standardized Precipitation-Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) and Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) at different accumulation scales (from 3- to 72-months) using as input the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) and Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time Series datasets. The database includes approximately 4,800 events based on SPEI-3 and 4,500 based on SPI-3. Each event is described by its start and end date, duration, intensity, severity, peak, average and maximum area in drought, and a special score to classify 52 mega-droughts. New Hydrological Insights for the Region under Study We derived trends in drought frequency and severity, separately for SPI and SPEI at a 12-month accumulation scale, which is usually related to hydrological droughts. Results show several drought hotspots in the last decades: Amazonia, southern South America, the Mediterranean region, most of Africa, north-eastern China and, to a lesser extent, central Asia and southern Australia. Over North America, central Europe, central Asia, and Australia, the recent progressive temperature increase outbalanced the increase in precipitation causing more frequent and severe droughts.JRC.E.1-Disaster Risk Managemen

I diritti economici, sociali e culturali. Promozione e tutela nella comunit\ue0 internazionale

Il volume raccoglie gli scritti di diversi studiosi di diritto internazionale, italiani e stranieri, dedicati ai diritti fondamentali della persona nella sfera economica, sociale e culturale. I temi affrontati, pur riguardando una delle principali categorie in cui sono tradizionalmente classificati i diritti umani, hanno ricevuto a lungo un\u2019attenzione secondaria rispetto ai diritti civili e politici, e solo in tempi pi\uf9 recenti sono divenuti oggetto di studio e di approfondita riflessione nella comunit\ue0 internazionale. Attraverso l\u2019esame delle norme rilevanti e della prassi internazionale, i vari studi offrono le chiavi di lettura e gli elementi necessari per comprendere il contenuto degli obblighi e dei diritti fondamentali in quest\u2019ambito, il loro comune obiettivo di garantire la realizzazione di condizioni di vita dignitose per ogni essere umano, nonch\ue9 per cogliere le connessioni che i diritti in esame hanno non solo tra di loro ma anche con i diritti civili e politici. A tal fine, oltre ad analisi di taglio generale e sistematico, sono affrontati nel dettaglio alcuni tra i pi\uf9 rilevanti diritti nel settore in questione (il diritto all\u2019alimentazione, all\u2019istruzione, all\u2019abitazione, a un ambiente sano e i diritti in materia di lavoro). Ampio spazio \ue8 dedicato all\u2019opera dei principali soggetti cui compete la tutela internazionale in tale materia, a partire dalle organizzazioni internazionali che hanno predisposto strumenti di protezione specifici (l\u2019ONU, l\u2019Organizzazione Internazionale del Lavoro, il Consiglio d\u2019Europa, l\u2019Organizzazione degli Stati Americani). A questa prospettiva tradizionale il volume affianca l\u2019analisi del ruolo fondamentale che nella promozione dei diritti economici, sociali e culturali spetta ad altri attori dell\u2019attuale vita di relazione internazionale, quali le istituzioni finanziarie internazionali, l\u2019Unione Europea, le imprese multinazionali.The book is one of the few existing books entirely devoted to Economic Social and Cultural Rights, and includes essays of various Scholars (F. Bestagno, M. Bothe, F. Costamagna, M. Cremona, P. De Sena, C. Di Turi, C. Dordi, M. Gestri, G. Gori, G. Malinverni, Card. R. Martino, R. Pisillo Mazzeschi, S. Sanna)