Background

Drought events pose a threat to crop productivity, can cause socioeconomic impacts such as decreased farmer income, and may even result in the need for international food aid. While several drought information and early warning systems are operational, they do not typically make use of the information available across scientific fields and tend to rely on simple indicators which only describe either agricultural, meteorological or hydrological drought alone. Information on socioeconomic factors that strongly affect drought impacts are also rarely considered, despite their importance.

GlobeDrought combines spatially explicit, historical information on drought hazard, exposure and vulnerability from meteorological, agricultural, hydrological and socioeconomic sources to provide reliable and comprehensive information on drought risk at a global level. These global analyses will be complemented by more detailed assessments in regions severely affected by droughts, namely, South Africa, Zimbabwe, the Missouri Basin in the USA, Maharashtra State in India and Ceará State in Brazil. In addition, this information will be used to model future trends in an experimental early warning system.

Project website

www.grow-globedrought.net/

Partners

Department of Crop Sciences, University of Göttingen
IGG-Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformation, University of Bonn
ZFL-Center for Remote Sensing of Land Surfaces, University of Bonn
Institute of Physical Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt
Institute for Environment and Human Security, United Nations University
Remote Sensing Solutions GmbH

Publications

Landmann T., Eidmann D., Cornish N., Franke J., Siebert S. (2019). Optimizing harmonics from Landsat time series data: the case of mapping rainfed and irrigated agriculture in Zimbabwe. Remote Sensing Letters 10:11, 1038-1046. DOI:10.1080/2150704X.2019.1648901

Eyshi Rezaei, E., S. Siebert, R. Manderscheid, J. Müller, A. Mahrookashani, B. Ehrenpfordt, J. Haensch, H.-J. Weigel, F. Ewert, (2018). Quantifying the response of wheat yields to heat stress: The role of the experimental setup. Field Crops Research 217, 93-103. DOI:10.1016/j.fcr.2017.12.015

Heino, M., Puma, M., Ward, P., Gerten, D., Heck, V., Siebert, S., Kummu, M. (2018) Two-thirds of global cropland area impacted by climate oscillations. Nature Communications 9, 1257. DOI:10.1038/s41467-017-02071-5

Eyshi Rezaei, E., Siebert, S., Hüging, H., Ewert, F. (2018). Climate change effect on wheat phenology depends on cultivar change. Scientific Reports 8, 4891. DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-23101-2

Hagenlocher, M., Meza, I., Anderson, C., Min, A., Renaud, F., Walz, Y., Siebert, S., Sebesvari, Z. (2019). Drought vulnerability and risk assessments: state of the art, persistent gaps, and research agenda. Environmental Research Letters 14(8). DOI:10.1088/1748-9326/ab225d.

Meza I., Hagenlocher M., Naumann G., Vogt J. V., Frischen J. (2019). Drought vulnerability indicators for global-scale drought risk assessments. JRC Technical Reports. DOI:10.2760/73844.

Siebert, S., Cornish, N., Döll, P., Dubovyk, O., Engels, O., Eyshi Rezaei, E., Gerdener, H., Gonzalez, J., Graw, V., Hagenlocher, M., Herbert, C., Kusche, J., Landmann, T., Meza, I., Nouri, H., Popat, E., Rupp, D. (2019). GlobeDrought – towards improved drought risk analysis and projection at global and regional scales. GlobeDrought Mid-Term Conference, 48-51.

Blauhut, V., Hagenlocher, M., Naumann, G. (2019). Drought risk analysis – state of the art and future challenges. EGU General Assembly 2019.