Mark Svoboda, NDMC director, presents at the Drought Resilience +10 conference in Geneva, Switzerland.By Emily Case-Buskirk, Communications Specialist
The Drought Resilience +10 meeting, held in Geneva, Switzerland, Sept. 30-Oct. 3, provided a gauge of progress since an initial meeting a decade ago and guidance on what the next 10 years of drought resilience will bring.
About 1,000 attendees from 143 countries attended, either virtually or in person. More than 280 attendees from 84 countries joined in person at the event, hosted at the World Meteorological Organization headquarters.
An initial High-Level Meeting on National Drought Policy was held in Geneva in 2013. The meeting was organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), with coordination from other organizations and UN agencies. This conference was built on the foundation the 2013 meeting created.
Mark Svoboda, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center, played a role in both meetings. He was on the organizational committee and gave numerous presentations at the DR +10 meeting. Kelly Smith, NDMC assistant director and drought impacts researcher, also attended and presented on drought impact collection.
The first meeting in 2013 helped many different groups get on the same page regarding drought management, Svoboda said. It provided a catalyst for fostering communication and coordination. Results from the initial meeting include a handbook on drought indicators and indices and a cost-benefit ratio of reactive versus proactive responses to drought.
As the keynote speaker of the DR +10 conference, Svoboda set the tone with a presentation titled, “Managing the Enigma of Drought: It’s Not About our Toolsets, It’s About our Mindset!”
He explained the proactive approach to drought is built on three pillars: monitoring and early warning; vulnerability and impact assessment; and mitigation, preparedness and response. This is a simplified version of a framework developed by Don Wilhite, the founding director of the NDMC.
Looking back on the past decade of drought work, Svoboda said he was “blown away” by the progress made in shifting to a proactive mindset.
“The explosion of growth over the last decade is tremendous,” he said. “I believe we have the data and tools we need to do the job. Now it’s about changing the mindset. Drought tends to be something you think you have time to deal with.”
The 2013 meeting emphasized drought action on a national level using the three pillars approach. In the two years following the first meeting, there was a push for more awareness and buy-in with workshops and learning from local stakeholders.
Technology developments in the last 10 years have also aided drought monitoring and response, including combining indicators and using expert-supervised machine learning. These new tools can be tailored to assess all different kinds of drought, including flash drought and ecological drought.
This presentation paved the way for the rest of the conference, which covered a wide array of topics known as workstreams. The nine themes were:
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Drought resilience and global alignment
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Drought risk governance
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Monitoring, assessing, and forecasting of droughts and their impacts
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Moving from policies to action
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Ecosystems
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Social inclusion and climate justice
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Drought finance
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Public-private-civil society partnerships
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Drought and health
During Workstream 3, which centered on monitoring drought and its impacts, Smith and Svoboda both presented.
Workstream 3 had a strong focus on how people monitor, track and assess the impacts of drought. In Smith’s presentation she discussed an upcoming publication she is leading, “Baseline Assessment of Drought Impact Collection/Monitoring Efforts.”
The article describes the different major approaches currently in use for monitoring and recording drought impacts. Those methods are event-driven, in-situ (crowdsourced reporting), media monitoring, food and water security monitoring, and data that may show a drought signal.
Flash drought was the focus of Svoboda’s Workstream 3 presentation. Flash droughts are challenging perceptions of drought as solely a slow-onset disaster—posing additional risk alongside traditional droughts. This type of drought can have significant impacts on systems including agriculture.
“Flash drought emphasizes the need for drought early warning systems channels to be functioning not just during a drought, but proactively ahead of time and ahead of forecasts,” he said.
In a final side session on Oct. 2, Svoboda shared success stories of collaborative projects to develop Drought Early Warning Systems in Eswatini, Australia, Morocco, Peru and more.
The conference ended with a working session. Following the event, conference organizers shared recommendations on how to support and grow drought resilience based on the workstreams and discussions that occurred during the week.
According to Svoboda, the next big challenge is continual buy-in from national government entities in developing drought plans, investing in drought early warning systems and supporting the groups most impacted by the effects of drought.
“We still have a long ways to go,” he said. “Remember, with drought we’re playing the long game. That’s important for future generations.”
DR +10 lays the groundwork for UNCCD’s 16th Conference of Parties in Riyadh in December.