Managing for Drought. Part II: Why Accounting for Nonmeteorological Uncertainties in Temporal and Spatial Scales Matters for Developing a Typology of Drought Managers

Drought is projected to be one of the most pernicious and devastating hazards associated with a changing climate. Substantial portions of the United States are projected to face longer and hotter droughts that will test drought plans and drought-oriented decision making. This can be particularly challenging because many drought plans and responses have been developed during periods that have notbeen tested by the extreme and sustained drought scenarios that might accompany climate change futures.

Discrete drought plans and drought management practices tend to be highly pre-determined by specific temporal and spatial boundaries that are aligned with particular organizational and institutional boundaries -- despite the fact that the spatial and temporal uncertainties embodied in droughts rarely align with those boundaries. For instance, spatial boundaries are usually determined by the area of responsibility or the management boundaries of any particular drought manager or decision maker – a municipal water manager has a plan and a set of practices and way of looking at drought that is generally circumscribed by the boundaries of the municipality; a public land resource manager (e.g., a planner for US Forestry Service) is generally making decisions about a particular piece of public land; an agricultural irrigator makes decisions about one’s farmland; etc. Droughts, however, are rarely contained to these management boundaries. More significantly, the drought management actions that occur on any one spatial unit across a landscape often fail to be well aligned with adjoining or even distal spatial units that might be affected by a drought decision in one space. Thus, spatial boundaries and scales might define a drought manager’s management and decision making domain, but, it is likely that the decisions made at any one scale will have a greater area of influence than the boundaries of that domain. In addition, there are often significant ambiguities and disconnections between different drought management systems and the non-meteorological factors that affect decision making across a landscape that can lead, for instance, an agricultural irrigator to make decisions that have unexpected impacts on, for instance, a municipality or public land manager.

Temporal uncertainties and misalignments also contribute to complicating and heightening the non-meteorological uncertainties that affect the response to (and preparedness for) droughts. Multiple definitions of drought clash to create a broad environment of uncertainties; however, those definitions may or may not align with real-world perceptions or institutional capacity to respond to or prepare for drought. Long, sustained droughts – especially, when coupled with higher than expected temperatures – can exhaust planned resources and planned responses because managers and planners have never experienced these kinds of droughts before. In addition, almost no drought plan is designed to respond to the experience of “flash drought” – something that might be experienced by, for instance, a farmer, while never even being recognized or acknowledged by a government or agency actor.

This talk will broadly contribute to a typology (discussed in partner presentations by Wilke and Haigh) of drought managers by examining social, institutional, organizational, perceptual, and practical challenges to preparing for and responding to drought in the 21^stcentury. In order to illustrate many of these points, this talk will be grounded by a description of specific examples from the author’s research on water/drought managers and decision makers along the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo. These examples will illustrate how non-meteorological spatial and temporal fragmentation of “drought thinking” across the 3000 km of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo heighten the already-uncertain nature of drought as a weather/climate hazard, and how this can be understood to contribute to risks to human security.