Assessment of Regional Drought based on Resilience Concept - A Case Study of Jiaodong Peninsula

As global changes and human activities intensify, extreme drought events are becoming increasingly frequent. The entire process of drought disasters typically involves multiple stages, such as the risk assessment of drought occurrence, along with the response measures and influencing factors at various stages-before, during, and after the occurrence of drought disasters. However, existing assessments often focus on a single process of drought, and the definition of drought resilience remains unclear. Drought resilience is the result of the interplay between climatic, socio-economic, and hydraulic engineering factors, enabling a multi-process evaluation of drought conditions. This paper defined drought resilience based on the three components of resilience: "defensive capacity, recovery capacity, and adaptive capacity," and developed a comprehensive assessment framework for drought resilience from the perspective of the entire drought process, termed the "Climate-Drought Response" framework. This assessment framework employs the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI) to characterize regional climate features and assesses regional drought response capacity using a combination weighting method based on both subjective and objective factors through game theory. It integrates the characteristics of disaster-prone climates with drought response capacity to evaluate regional drought resilience comprehensively, analyzing the ability to defensive, recovery, and adaptive to drought disasters, as well as its alignment with regional climate features. This framework addresses the limitations of previous quantitative drought assessments that primarily focused on risk identification or mitigation measures, often neglecting the flexibility of the system to recover from drought to a normal state. It is applied to evaluate the drought resilience of three cities in the Jiaodong Peninsula of East China, aiming to provide insights for the development of economically viable drought management strategies. The results indicate a declining trend in the SPEI across the Jiaodong Peninsula, suggesting that future climate conditions may become increasingly arid. Most regions exhibit moderate to fairly strong drought resilience, effectively responding to slight drought events. However, their resilience is insufficient to cope with moderate to extreme droughts or prolonged drought events, particularly in Qingdao and Weihai. Although the overall capacities of "defensive capacity, recovery capacity, and adaptive capacity" show an upward trend, the resilience values are declining, indicating that the increases in some drought response components are insufficient to offset the negative effects of increasingly arid climate conditions. To effectively enhance drought resilience in the Jiaodong Peninsula, the primary task is to strengthen the supplementation of local conventional water sources with water transfers and unconventional water sources, while Qingdao and Weihai must further improve its water supply capacity to ensure water security during drought periods.