Drought Management Plans in Spain: Are we improving the way we manage drought?

Droughts affect all the socio-economic sectors and can have negative impacts on the environment. They are expected to increase in frequency and severity due to climate change, which makes their effective management a policy priority. Drought Management Plans (DMPs) are considered to be a key instrument to deal with drought in a proactive way, as they establish a framework for coordinated action when drought sets in. The development of DMPs is still incipient worldwide and the evaluation of their quality and performance is still very limited. In Spain, DMPs at river basin level were first approved in 2007. Following the legal obligation set in the Spanish law, those DMPs were revised after 10 years and a new version was approved in 2018. In order to analyze the adequacy, pertinence and utility of those plans, we developed a protocol based on content analysis for evaluating the DMPs of the eight river basins that are managed by the Spanish Central Government. We set the evaluation criteria using official guidelines and scientific literature on drought preparedness and we compared the first and the second round of DMPs to identify the main improvements, gaps and challenges. The comparison was both qualitative and quantitative, through the establishment of quality criteria/indicators.

The analysis showed that the scope and content of the DMPs is more homogeneous and consistent in 2018 than in 2007. Some aspects have clearly improved between the two planning periods, like the distinction between drought and water scarcity, the definition of indices to trigger different levels of drought alert and the inclusion of measures for drought management and coordination. Other issues still need further improvements, especially those related to the analysis of drought impacts, the assessment of vulnerability and the ex-post evaluation of DPM performance.

The DMPs developed for the Júcar and Segura river basins, both located in the Mediterranean region and prone to severe droughts, received the highest score according to our assessment criteria. All the DMPs show some improvements between 2007 and 2018, but the largest increase corresponds to the Duero river basin while the least is for the Júcar.