Completing the drought impact database for the transboundary region of the Prut Valley (Romania/Republic of Moldova)

Knowledge on the impact of droughts represents a pivotal milestone for the assessment of drought risk and the improvement of water management. While drought as a hazard has a non-boundary spatial pattern, different countries, with different socio-economic backgrounds can be characterized by various levels of vulnerability and follow different paths to cope with its. Deciphering the impacts of the past drought events can considerably improve societal complex responses and inform the choice of adaptive measures and water supply management in the face of the future similar events. Building-up a database of past droughts along the Prut Valley represents the first work package of the project: “Exploring the paths to cope with hydro-climatic risks in transboundary rural areas along the Prut Valley. A multi-criteria analysis”. A comprehensive database was created regarding the events recorded between 1860 and 2024 on both banks of the Prut River. The data were gathered from scientific literature and by exploring the digital and printed newspapers from both countries (written in Romanian, in Romanian with Cyrillic characters and in Russian). The information about droughts has been recorded and presented differently, mainly because of particular political, economic, and social conditions from the two countries (we mention that during the period 1918-1940 both territories were within the same borders). The supervised collection of the impact of droughts made possible a rigorous selection of events, eliminating duplicates, irrelevant news, and an in depth analysis of cascading impacts. The value of this database is multiplied by the geoscientific expertise of the authors as well as by the investigation of all the available documents.

The main result consists in the identification of the main temporal benchmarks (such as those from 1904, 1907, 1928, 1946, 1965) and spatial hotspots (especially in the southern part of the study area) in the manifestation of droughts. Coupling the database with GIS techniques that allow us a large type of assigned attributes, the cartographical outputs of this work will clearly contribute to an accurate configuration of past drought events. This constitutes a scientific starting point for drought risk assessment, better choices of adaptive measures and the improvement of water management targeting citizens, farmers, and decision-makers.

Some conclusions can be addressed regarding future approaches of the mitigation of droughts in rural agricultural areas such as our study area: (i) droughts are not only a farmers major problem but they affect entire rural communities; (ii) solving local capacity to develop alternative water supply during the summer must represent not only a local/regional priority but a national and European Union one; (iii) increasing resilience to droughts must include a participatory locally-adapted approach based on the experience of citizens; (iv) there is a pressing need to acknowledge the importance of transboundary network and projects, especially in the case of droughts monitoring and proactive water management.