Droughts: a global assessment

Drought is a global phenomenon that can and does occur in virtually all landscapes, resulting in significant economic, social and environmental costs and losses. These costs and losses have risen dramatically in recent decades. Drought is an insidious hazard of nature which is considered by many to be the most complex but least understood of all natural hazards. History tells us that societies have seldom been prepared for the inevitable recurrence of drought. It is often considered to be a rare and random event, certainly not one that could be anticipated, planned for, and its impacts effectively managed. In recent decades, the impacts of drought have escalated in response to increasing population, misdirected or non sustainable government policies and programs, environmental degradation, new technologies, and fragmented government authority in water and natural resources management. These escalating impacts have increasingly drawn the attention of both the scientific and policy community, not only because of the frequency and severity of recent droughts in both developing and developed countries, but also because of the complexity of economic impacts associated with the phenomenon and its far-reaching social costs and environmental damages. The goal of this book is to provide the scientific and policy community with information in the form of new technologies and methodologies, as well as lessons learned, that will help nations define a new paradigm for drought planning and management in the 21st Century. The overview chapters and case studies included in this book provide information to scientists, policy makers, and planners that, if implemented, can reduce the devastation of drought through improved prediction and monitoring techniques, mitigation programs and policies, and contingency planning. The completion of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction provided a unique opportunity to implement this new paradigm for drought management in the 21st Century.