Understanding Driving Mechanisms and Socioeconomic Impacts during Extreme Drought Events

Drought is one of the most widespread and complex natural hazards, with the potential to inflict significant socioeconomic damage. However, current research still falls short in addressing catastrophic droughts, particularly in predicting the socioeconomic consequences of extreme drought scenarios. This study developed a socioeconomic drought classification model based on drought-affected population during extreme drought events, integrating both natural climatic factors and human activity factors to systematically evaluate the spatial patterns and driving mechanisms of socioeconomic drought. The results demonstrate the model exhibits excellent predictive performance (0.85±0.015) for different levels of socioeconomic disaster events. Additionally, SHAP-based feature importance analysis revealed that precipitation, spatial distribution of water sources, and human water consumption constitute the three key driving factors of socioeconomic drought, with the first two factors showing particularly prominent contributions. Notably, the impact of human water consumption on socioeconomic drought exhibits a significant time-lag effect (approximately 4-9months), indicating that longer temporal scales should be considered when assessing anthropogenic influences on drought. These findings highlight the necessity of incorporating both climatic variability and anthropogenic factors in future drought impact assessments, offering new insights for adaptive water resource management under changing environments.