Support for Drought Response and Community Preparedness: Filling the Gaps between Plans and Action

This chapter examines which levels of government handle various aspects of drought, as well as interactions between levels of government, providing examples from states across the western United States. It also takes a look at aspects of drought that fall outside traditional lines of authority and disciplinary boundaries. As part of a discussion on how states support local drought response, the chapter details and contrasts how California and Colorado track public water supply restrictions, and describes Colorado’s process for incorporating input from river basins across the state into its water plan. Case studies focus on drought planning in the Klamath River and Upper Colorado River basins through the lens of collaborative environmental planning. The chapter concludes that drought planning will be more effective as more states coordinate and align goals and policies at multiple levels of government

Support for Drought Response and Community Preparedness: Filling the Gaps between Plans and Action

This chapter examines which levels of government handle various aspects of drought, as well as interactions between levels of government, providing examples from states across the western United States. It also takes a look at aspects of drought that fall outside traditional lines of authority and disciplinary boundaries. As part of a discussion on how states support local drought response, the chapter details and contrasts how California and Colorado track public water supply restrictions, and describes Colorado’s process for incorporating input from river basins across the state into its water plan. Case studies focus on drought planning in the Klamath River and Upper Colorado River basins through the lens of collaborative environmental planning. The chapter concludes that drought planning will be more effective as more states coordinate and align goals and policies at multiple levels of government

Critical Analysis of the Value of Drought Information and Impacts on Land Management and Public Health

This paper reviews previous efforts to assign monetary value to climatic or meteorological information, such as public information on drought, climate, early warning systems, and weather forecast information. Methods and tools that have been explored to examine the benefits of climatic and meteorological information include the avoided cost, contingent valuation, choice experiments, benefit transfer, and descriptive approaches using surveys. The second part of this paper discusses specific considerations related to valuing drought information for public health and the Bureau of Land Management. We found a multitude of connections between drought and the land management and health sectors in the literature. The majority of the papers that we summarized only report biophysical change, because the economic losses of drought are not available. Only a few papers reported economic loss associated with drought. To determine the value of drought information, we need to know more about the role it plays in decision making and what sources of drought information are used in different sectors. This inventory of methods and impacts highlights opportunities for further research in valuing drought information in land management and public health

Building an Improved Drought Climatology Using Updated Drought Tools: A New Mexico Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Systems Focus

Drought is a familiar climatic phenomenon in the United States Southwest, with complex human-environment interactions that extend beyond just the physical drought events. Due to continued climate variability and change, droughts are expected to become more frequent and/or severe in the future. Decision-makers are charged with mitigating and adapting to these more extreme conditions and to do that they need to understand the specific impacts drought has on regional and local scales, and how these impacts compare to historical conditions. Tremendous progress in drought monitoring strategies has occurred over the past several decades, with more tools providing greater spatial and temporal resolutions for a variety of variables, including drought impacts. Many of these updated tools can be used to develop improved drought climatologies for decision-makers to use in their drought risk management actions. In support of a Food-Energy-Water (FEW) systems study for New Mexico, this article explores the use of updated drought monitoring tools to analyze data and develop a more holistic drought climatology applicable for New Mexico. Based upon the drought climatology, droughts appear to be occurring with greater frequency and magnitude over the last two decades. This improved drought climatology information, using New Mexico as the example, increases the understanding of the effects of drought on the FEW systems, allowing for better management of current and future drought events and associated impacts

Valuation of Drought Information: Understanding the Value of the US Drought Monitor in Land Management

Droughts affect recreation and tourism, grazing, forests, and timber, and can have important indirect effects for the ecosystems and species that rely on water. Despite its importance, the effect of drought in the land management sector is less understood than in other water-intensive sectors, such as agriculture and public water supplies. This study presents the first-ever estimates of the economic valuation of the information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor using the avoided cost method. These estimates are based on the time and labor saved by using the U.S. Drought Monitor rather than compiling drought-related information from other sources, or using other sources for tracking/monitoring droughts, communicating drought conditions, and dealing with drought-related issues. The results reflect rational behavior—the more time needed to compile or collect drought information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor, the higher the dollar value in avoided cost. This dollar amount also varies by institution and organization, which indicates respondents from different organizations value the information from the U.S. Drought Monitor differently. For example, compared to the state offices, the field offices in the Bureau of Land Management value more of the information provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor. These estimates can be used to estimate the societal benefits and help policy makers evaluate the U.S. Drought Monitor in different sectors

TweetDrought: A Deep-Learning Drought Impacts Recognizer based on Twitter Data

Acquiring a better understanding of drought impacts becomes increasingly vital under a warming climate. Traditional drought indices describe mainly biophysical variables and not impacts on social, economic, and environmental systems. We utilized natural language processing and bidirectional encoder representation from Transformers (BERT) based transfer learning to fine-tune the model on the data from the news-based Drought Impact Report (DIR) and then apply it to recognize seven types of drought impacts based on the filtered Twitter data from the United States. Our model achieved a satisfying macro-F1 score of 0.89 on the DIR test set. The model was then applied to California tweets and validated with keyword-based labels. The macro-F1 score was 0.58. However, due to the limitation of keywords, we also spot-checked tweets with controversial labels. 83.5% of BERT labels were correct compared to the keyword labels. Overall, the fine-tuned BERT-based recognizer provided proper predictions and valuable information on drought impacts. The interpretation and analysis of the model were consistent with experiential domain expertise

Whose Ground Truth Is It? Harvesting Lessons from Missouri’s 2018 Bumper Crop of Drought Observations

Drought-related decision-making and policy should go beyond numeric hydrometeorological data to incorporate information on how drought affects people, livelihoods, and ecosystems. The effects of drought are nested within environmental and human systems, and relevant data may not exist in readily accessible form. For example, drought may reduce forage growth, compounded by both late-season freezes and management decisions. An effort to gather crowdsourced drought observations in Missouri in 2018 yielded a much higher number of observations than did previous related efforts. Here we examine 1) the interests, circumstances, history, and recruitment messaging that coincided to produce a high number of reports in a short time; 2) whether and how information from volunteer observers was useful to state decision-makers and to U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) authors; and 3) potential for complementary use of stakeholder and citizen science reports in assessing trustworthiness of volunteer-provided information. State officials and the Cattlemen’s Association made requests for reports, clearly linked to improving the accuracy of the USDM and the related financial benefit. Well-timed requests provided a focus for people’s energy and a reason to invest their time. State officials made use of the dense spatial coverage that observers provided. USDM authors were very cautious about a surge of reports coinciding closely with financial incentives linked to the Livestock Forage Disaster program. An after-the-fact comparison between stakeholder reports and parallel citizen science reports suggests that the two could be complementary, with potential for developing protocols to facilitate real-time use

LOCAL OBSERVERS FILL IN THE DETAILS ON DROUGHT IMPACT REPORTER MAPS

We all know that talking politics and religion in social settings-with friends, family, or strangers- can be a firestarter. By contrast, talking about the weather is a reliably safe conversational opener. But there\u27s another reason that the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) wants people to talk about weather. Individuals can provide a rich source of weather-related anecdotes and observations that prove critical to evaluating droughts and enabling appropriate responses. The mechanism for this valuable conversation with the public is the Drought Impact Reporter (DIR). Lately, the NDMC has been working to refine the way this online service encourages citizen observers and incorporates information directly from them

The Missing Piece: Drought Impacts Monitoring Report from a Workshop in Tucson, AZ MARCH 5-6, 2013

Based on a shared interest to better understand the impacts of drought and the potential utility of using drought impacts reporting as a tool for monitoring conditions, researchers from the Carolinas RISA (Dow, Lackstrom, and Brennan), the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (Crimmins and Ferguson), and the Southwest Climate Science Center (Meadow) decided to convene a workshop in Tucson in March 2013. The primary goal was to assemble a small group of university and agency scientists involved with drought impacts monitoring to discuss opportunities and barriers associated with drought impacts reporting, recommend best practices for implementing a drought impacts reporting system, and develop a path forward for addressing or overcoming barriers. The longer-term objective of the initial meeting was to explore the feasibility of creating a community of practice that could share information and integrate activities related to drought impacts research and reporting

BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE NETWORK OF DROUGHT COMMUNITIES

The first step in managing large-scale (national) collaborations and networks is to consider and address how a group and a potential partnership may match up (Luther, 2005). To explore this concept and many other collaborative concepts, the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) hosted a workshop, “Building a Sustainable Network of Drought Communities,” which was facilitated by the National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC) in Chicago, IL, June 8-9, 2011. The workshop explored current examples of good communication and lessons learned within the realm of drought planning in order to address a future NIDIS Engaging Preparedness Communities (EPC) working group that is solution-focused and collaborative. With the diversity and experience of the participants at this meeting, a wealth of good practices or lessons learned in drought planning, preparedness, and general stakeholder engagement set the pathway for building a sustainable community of drought practitioners. In his opening remarks, NIDIS Director Roger Pulwarty noted that adaptive institutions can show robustness in the following ways: Levels of alertness—monitoring the external world for early warning signs that key assumptions are likely to verify/fail and a commitment to rigorous monitoring of performance; Agility—the ability to react to early warning signs of problems or opportunities; flow of knowledge across components, and to adjust strategies and tactics rapidly to meet changes in the environment; and Alignment—the ability to align the whole organization (and partners) to its mission-policies and practices that give rise to failures/successes. Through an interactive workshop format that used Appreciative Inquiry (framing breakout sessions on success), the group was able to effectively discuss topics such as: • Integrating Planning Efforts • Planning Under Uncertainty • Evaluating, Assessing, and Updating Drought Plans • Leveraging Resources for Risk Management • Implementing Plans and Planning Information • Synthesizing Success Stories and Lessons Learned • Creating a Sustainable Network of Drought Professionals The most common themes resulting from the workshop included: • Importance of networking and collaboration—this is a necessity. Figuring out how to make it seamless is the main goal that the NIDIS EPC Community should foster. Good communication is the key among the drought practitioners and their stakeholders. • Celebrate success—in this future drought network, successes related to drought efforts should be highlighted within the community and to the public. This will help drive future positive interactions and collaborations. It also gives the community a sense of pride. • “Stakeholder Buy-In”—why should stakeholders stay engaged in an ongoing drought community? Especially when there is no drought? Again, good communication and collaborations with other multi-hazard, sustainability, and natural resources planning efforts will help keep drought a priority. • Economic, environmental, and social aspects of planning for drought—these should always be considered. This was a recurrent theme in the workshop. • Planners should not “reinvent the wheel”—planners involved in climate adaptation work can and should reference the best drought planning resources and case studies to help them incorporate drought in their overall planning efforts. • “Have a plan for the plan”—how and who will make it happen? What kind of leadership is needed within the NIDIS EPC community to track its progress and success? • Sharing of resources—as budgets become slimmer, a central location of available resources and the sharing of resources in the area of drought preparedness and mitigation is necessary. Communication regarding these potential resources should also be integrated into this NIDIS EPC community. Since the occurrence of the workshop, several EPC-related activities have taken place, including a webinar in December 2011. This workshop report and additional EPC updates will be placed on the U.S. Drought portal (www.drought.gov). Currently, the American Planning Association (APA), NIDIS and the NDMC are collaborating to produce a Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report to connect drought mitigation resources with the planning practices of local, regional, tribal and state governments. This builds on the work of the APA’s Hazard Planning Center, which produced a similar PAS Report (sponsored by FEMA) on how to integrate multi-hazard planning into planning practices. In May 2012: The APA’s drought planning project webpage went live and can be found at: http://www.planning.org/research/drought/index.ht