Developing drought resilience through Early Warning System with knowledge for action in multi-level governance

Since the turn of the 21st century, the capacity of many terrestrial ecosystems to withstand pressures is being eroded, with severe water stress in summer being one of the significant causes and consequences. With droughts projected to become more frequent, and to have more severe impacts, coping strategies must be in place. Some effects of droughts on human water and food systems and from ill-adapted human use of water can be mitigated through the implementation of early warning systems (EWS), which can predict the severity and duration of a drought. However, these systems should also elicit a response, delivering timely information to decision makers, including all involved in land and water management. This will allow for proactive risk management measures and appropriate emergency response programs. To comprehensively deal with such complex problems, innovative and integrated governance approaches are necessary. An approach put forward to manage complex social-environmental problems such as droughts is adaptive governance, which calls for more flexible and learning-based collaborations and decision-making processes involving all relevant actors and stakeholders across different governance levels.

Here we present the concept for an integrated drought EWS that provides prestructured accessible data and actionable knowledge across actors at different levels of governance. We propose the development of an accessible multiple-source-design web platform with a structure to cater for different user groups. The monitoring and associated EWS would allow data and scenario visualisation, along with ongoing networked and collaborative experimentation with adaptation and mitigation measures. The platform would also include an interactive blogging domain. In co-designing the EWS with stakeholders the project aims to create a sense of co-ownership to encourage active engagement, bringing together interest groups in agriculture and water to prioritize future challenges concerning resilience of ecosystems involving water, soil and agriculture.

The concept is developed based on the case of Luxembourg as a small country, but the innovative approach to co-creating knowledge for action across different scales is relevant in diverse contexts. The proposed EWS would function across scales, offering access to different spatial and temporal scales of representations of circumstances relating to drought risks, accessible to various actors across different levels of governance. For contiguous spatial representations relating to the entire territory of the nation state (and surroundings), remote sensing data from satellites would be used, such as EU and national data on land cover and land use and satellite based soil moisture. Official measurement stations and monitoring programmes on river levels and precipitation levels provide additional information at the spatial scale of individual larger rivers at the catchment level. With decreased spatial scales, municipalities or individual plots of land of farmers become the focus. The remote sensing and modelled data would need to be supplemented with ground truthing to increase the levels of accuracy, precision, and geographic scale, to reflect the real drought impacts on the ground. Citizen science can provide these data sets necessary to complement the official ones. The various levels are not intended to be discrete, but to form elements of a complete system.