Development of Dynamic Drought Vulnerability Assessment Considering Global Climate Change and Regional Water Demand-Supply Networks

Globally, drought affects different types of regions and countries, making it one of the most devastating natural disasters in terms of impacts on agriculture and food security, ecosystems, human health, and water resources. As the importance of integrated drought management including disaster risk reduction, climate change adaptation strategies, and national water policies is emphasized internationally, it is important to develop an effective water management technology for proactive drought response rather than reactive drought management to cope with drought disaster. In this study, we propose an approach to dynamic drought vulnerability assessment that can be used to secure elasticity for water demand and supply during drought event and further respond to a preemptive drought. Drought response and management based on this dynamic drought vulnerability assessment technology has consistency in that it promotes an internationally pursued convergence strategy for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. The dynamic drought vulnerability assessment is based on the water demand-supply linkage assessment in various types of droughts. In other words, this is a technology for improving the ability to respond to drought through flexible water supply in the actual drought events. Dynamic drought vulnerability assessment produces various types of drought vulnerability map considering various scenarios of drought occurrence and socio-economic pathways according to climate change. For example, when combining hydrological drought scenarios considering climate change (25 types), water demand scenarios according to social/economic/environmental changes (3 types), water supply scenarios of drought damage/sensitivity by region (4 types), storage ratio scenarios of dam and reservoir (12 types), at least 2100 scenarios are produced as database. In the future, these results can be used as a basis for scientific decision-making in preparing countermeasures to improve resilience to drought.

Acknowledgement: This work was supported by the Korea Environment Industry & Technology Institute (KEITI) through Water Management Innovation Program for Drought (No. 2022003610001) funded by Korea Ministry of Environment.