Co-designing climate services for drought management in the Guadalquivir River Basin

Water availability is a limiting factor for many human activities and for the maintenance of ecosystems. Monitoring of water resources, as well as the impacts of water scarcity on human activities and natural ecosystems, is key for building adequate water management strategies. With this aim, different European and Worldwide organisations provide several datasets and services. However, do these services fit to the user needs and requirements?

This work focusses on the refinement of existing drought indexes for fitting users’ needs. We review the specifications and characteristics of drought related databases obtained from Copernicus, such as the European Drought Observatory (EDO) and the Global Drought Observatory (GDO) at Copernicus Emergency Management Service, tools produced by the United Nations - UNCCD Drought Toolbox- and other datasets provided by research centres such as CSIC or the Global SPEI database.

Climate services are obtained by tailoring the datasets to the needs and recommendations expressed by selected stakeholders representing different relevant sectors: agriculture, livestock, forestry, biodiversity, etc. and different professional profiles: decisions makers on water management strategies, managers of protected areas, farmers, etc. Thanks to innovative settings, such as living lab frameworks, stakeholders are enabled to co-design the new drought services proposed, as well as helping to improve the indexes through sharing the evaluation of their usability and impact when implemented in real-life decision taking processes.

The new drought related information products and services obtained through co-production, contribute to improve

• the spatial resolution requirements of the involved climate variables (mainly temperature and precipitation) by remote sensing products (i.e. land surface temperature, vegetation indexes, etc.)  through downscaling techniques of the existing drought databases
• the coherence between these derived remote sensing products and the existing in-situ observations
• the usability of climate services for decision making

The living lab framework underpinning this study is located in the Guadalquivir River Basin, in the northern part of the region of Andalusia, Spain, particularly vulnerable to drought impacts. Results will help improving mitigation and adaptation measures to reduce the vulnerability to different drought scenarios forecasted for the upper and middle parts of the Basin.