About Drought Handbook: Outputs & Impacts

THE DWS
PROJECTS
Historic Droughts
Historic Droughts aimed
to develop a cross-disciplinary
understanding of past drought
episodes that have affected the UK,
with a view to developing improved
tools for managing droughts in
future.
Our starting point was that droughts
are not simply natural hazards. There
are also a range of socio-economic
and regulatory factors that may
influence the course of droughts,
such as water consumption
practices and abstraction licensing
regimes. Consequently, if drought
and water scarcity are to be
better managed, there is a need
for a more detailed understanding
of the links between physical (i.e.
meteorological, hydrological) and
social and economic systems during
droughts.
With this research gap in
mind, the Historic Droughts
project has been developing an
interdisciplinary understanding
of drought from a range of
perspectives. Based on an analysis
of information from a wide range
of sectors (hydrometeorological,
environmental, agricultural,
regulatory, social and cultural),
the project has characterised and
quantified the history of drought
and water scarcity since the late
19th century.
The project has developed the
18
first systematic account (the
UK Drought Inventory) of past
droughts in the UK, incorporating
new datasets on past drought
characteristics, impacts and human
responses. The Inventory is the basis
of a novel joint hydrometeorological
and socio-economic analysis that
is leading to a ‘systems-based’
understanding of drought. The
project has been applying these
new datasets and methodologies
to enhance drought management,
principally through interfacing with
the ENDOWS work with decisionmakers.
Below we discuss some of
the Historic Droughts outputs and
activities in more detail.
Systems-based analysis and
conceptual framework
We have advocated a ‘systemsbased’
view of drought, i.e. an
understanding of the multiple and
inter-connected drivers of drought,
the impacts of and responses
to drought, and the feedbacks
between them. A key part of this
has been the development of a
Conceptual Framework for the
joint hydro-meteorological-social
understanding of drought. We
published this framework in 2017
and illustrated its application to
two past drought episodes (1976
and 2003 – 2006). We expect this
systems-based understanding to
improve decision-making for future