Advancing Drought Early Warning Systems: Using Recent Drought to Develop New Partnerships with Public Health Communities

Recent droughts have brought forth an awareness of the linkages between drought and human health. From water quality to mental health to disease, impacts of the often slow moving disaster on human health can be complex and nuanced. Droughts in the United States, however, are generally not thought of as public health threats. As NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) continues to work with a wide range of partners to improve the nation’s capacity to manage drought-related risks, lessons learned from recent drought has identified a need to better support the public health sector and better integrate them into regional and national drought preparedness activities.

This presentation will explore recent examples of the linkages between drought impacts on human health from across several regional Drought Early Warning Systems (DEWS) and how NIDIS is working with its partners to better support and prepare the public health community for the health hazards associated with drought. This includes research support, recent workshops sharing the state of knowledge, and identifying gaps and needs for evidence-based research, capacity building, and communication. In addition we will also discuss creating a drought-public health community of researchers to practitioners that will work together to make drought science readily available, easily understandable and usable while improving the capacity of this sector to better monitor, forecast, plan for and cope with the impacts of drought.