Drought impacts in Alpine regions – classifying and investigating the most affected sectors in heterogeneous mountain terrain

Drought is rarely associated with Alpine regions, but as documented in recent years droughts have caused a variety of impacts even in these humid mountain climates. Accordingly, a reduction of vulnerability to drought in Alpine and pre-Alpine regions is required in order to minimize future impacts from upstream to downstream areas and across political boundaries. Therefore, sound information of Alpine droughts as well as knowledge of their impacts is essential. But drought-specific data on the multiple economic losses in mountain regions are scarce and may differ from the usually assessed agriculturally-dominated lowlands. This study aims to clarify todays state of the art on drought impact information in Alpine regions and claims data needs for a comprehensive understanding of Alpine drought risk. More specifically, the objective is to systematically assess the differences of impacts specific to the Alpine region compared to non-Alpine regions. The hypothesis is that specific climate conditions due to the heterogeneous terrain and high altitudes determine the Alpine environment as well as the economical practices and societal adaptations, which differ strongly from lowlands. Subsequently, the sectoral-impacts in mountain regions might vary substantially, especially with regard to the onset and severity of impacts as well as their spatial and temporal extend. The European Drought Impact Report Inventory (EDII) compiles knowledge on the impacts of drought events across Europe from a variety of information sources based on more than 10,000 reported impacts. The current content of the EDIIs database was filtered to the Alpine Space region which make up about 15 % of all entries in all 15 main categories of the classification system. The main affected sectors are ‘agriculture and livestock farming’,’ ‘public water supply’ and ‘energy and industry’. The high proportion of impacts in the latter category is a main difference in the distribution of impacts compared to that of entire Europe. For the individual Alpine countries and regarding the detailed subtypes of the impacts, however, substantial variability was found among the different countries. To obtain a comprehensive risk assessment further research has to establish novel ways to collect more regional impact information for these strongly heterogeneous research areas, with respect to climate, topography and report languages.