Drought is one of the major natural hazards, resulting in significant economic, social, and environmental costs. In Europe, water shortage is an important problem in many regions. However, despite the increasing awareness of this hazard, there is no European drought policy and institutional frameworks to cope with drought situations are only weakly developed. This book is dedicated to furthering our understanding of the drought problem in Europe and to discussing policy and management options to mitigate its impacts. It covers aspects from the detection of water stress to the planning of mitigation strategies. The contributions are written by recognised experts in their field and represent a unique collection of papers on the topic. Audience: The book will be of benefit to scientists, managers, and politicians involved in problems related to water management, risk assessment, and spatial planning. Students in Earth Sciences, especially in geography, climatology, hydrology, and agriculture, will find useful material in this collection of papers.

This volume includes over 30 chapters, written by experts from around the world. It examines the environmental aspects of drought such as groundwater and soil contamination, river low-flow, urban water quality, and desertification. It also examines the effects of climate change and variability on drought, and discusses the differences in groundwater, rainfall, and temperatures and their related effects. It presents analytical modeling for better understanding drought in uncertain and changing climates.

Frequent drought events have recently occurred in different Mediterranean regions. These have highlighted a general inadequacy of the current strategies applied to mitigate negative impacts of such phenomenon. This book provides various methods of drought monitoring at different spatial scales, as well as innovative drought forecasting techniques based on stochastic approaches. Besides common drought indices (i.e. SPI), new agrometeorological indices are proposed.

Applied Drought Modelling, Prediction, and Mitigation provides a practical guide to new and recent methodologies for drought characterizations, change modeling, down-scaling, and future predictions. The modeling procedures covered by the book include recent advancements in regional drought extent, coverage, intensity, and water deficit predictions, which are increasingly significant given current climate change impacts on water resources. Each modeling procedure is explained theoretically prior to the mathematical derivation, and includes book examples, exercises, and case studies that supplement the applied and practical material, thus making the approaches accessible and applicable to the reader. - Presents new and recent methodologies for drought characterizations, change modeling, down-scaling, and future predictions - Includes online modeling tools to help readers quickly solve drought related problems - Presents methodologies, including drought features (duration, intensity, and magnitude) at any desired risk level - Include case studies from arid and semi-arid regions

Drought risk management involves three pillars: drought early warning, drought vulnerability and risk assessment, and drought preparedness, mitigation, and response. This book collects in one place a description of all the key components of the first pillar, and describes strategies for fitting these pieces together. The best modern drought early warning systems incorporate and integrate a broad array of environmental information sources: weather station observations, satellite imagery, land surface and crop model simulations, and weather and climate model forecasts, and analyze this information in context-relevant ways that take into account exposure and vulnerability. Drought Early Warning and Forecasting: Theory and Practice assembles a comprehensive overview of these components, providing examples drawn from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network and the United States Drought Monitor. This book simultaneously addresses the physical, social, and information management aspects of drought early warning, and informs readers about the tools, techniques, and conceptual models required to effectively identify, predict, and communicate potential drought-related disasters. This book is a key text for postgraduate scientists and graduate and advanced undergraduate students in hydrology, geography, earth sciences, meteorology, climatology, and environmental sciences programs. Professionals dealing with disaster management and drought forecasting will also find this book beneficial to their work.

Agricultural production is highly sensitive to weather and climate-related disasters such as drought, storm and flood. While it is not possible to prevent the occurrence of natural disasters, the resultant disastrous effects can be reduced mitigated through proper planning and effective preparation. This book, based on a gathering of experts in Beijing, discusses ways to reduce the vulnerability of agriculture to disaster and extreme events, both by accurate and timely warning, and by impact-reducing countermeasures.

This book presents the findings of a team of scientists and practitioners who have been working on the project “Benefits of Governance in Drought Adaptation” (in short: the DROP project), which is included in the European Union’s INTERREG IVB NWE programme. The DROP governance team developed a Governance Assessment Tool (GAT), which allows the governance setting of a given region for planning and realizing drought adaptation measures to be assessed. Based on this assessment, recommendations can be developed for regional water authorities concerning how to operate most effectively towards increased drought resilience in this context. The GAT has been applied to six regions in Northwest Europe: Twente and Salland in the Netherlands, Eifel-Ruhr in Germany, Brittany in France, Somerset in the United Kingdom, and Flanders in Belgium. These regions are subject to drought aspects related to nature, agriculture and freshwater. This book will aid regional water authorities and other relevant stakeholders interested in governance assessment, whether that context is about water, more specifically about drought or flooding events, or other environmental issues. Further, the GAT can and has also been applied more broadly to a range of governance contexts for water management and beyond.