Articles

Why predict climate hazards if we need to understand impacts? Putting humans back into the drought equation

Enenkel, M.; Brown, M. E.; Vogt, J. V.; Reid Bell, A.; Guha-Sapir, D.; Dorigo, W.; Vasilaky, K.; Svoboda, M.; Bonifacio, R.; Anderson, M.; Funk, C.; Osgood, D.; Hain, C.; Vinck, P.

Virtually all climate monitoring and forecasting efforts concentrate on hazards rather than on impacts, while the latter are a priority for planning emergency activities and for the evaluation of mitigation strategies. Effective disaster risk management strategies need to consider the prevailing “human terrain” to predict who is at risk and how communities will be affected. There has been little effort to align the spatiotemporal granularity of socioeconomic assessments with the granularity of weather or climate monitoring. The lack of a high-resolution socioeconomic baseline leaves methodical approaches like machine learning virtually untapped for pattern recognition of extreme climate impacts on livelihood conditions. While the request for “better” socioeconomic data is not new, we highlight the need to collect and analyze environmental and socioeconomic data together and discuss novel strategies for coordinated data collection via mobile technologies from a drought risk management perspective. A better temporal, spatial, and contextual understanding of socioeconomic impacts of extreme climate conditions will help to establish complex causal pathways and quantitative proof about climate-attributable livelihood impacts. Such considerations are particularly important in the context of the latest big datadriven initiatives, such as the World Bank’s Famine Action Mechanism (FAM).

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Title
Climatic Change
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-020-02878-0

More About This Work

Academic Units
International Research Institute for Climate and Society
Published Here
March 13, 2024

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