Drought and society: Scientific progress, blind spots, and future prospects

Abstract

Human activities have increasingly intensified the severity, frequency, and negative impacts of droughts in several regions across the world. This trend has led to broader scientific conceptualizations of drought risk that account for human actions and their interplays with natural systems. This review focuses on physical and engineering sciences to examine the way and extent to which these disciplines account for social processes in relation to the production and distribution of drought risk. We conclude that this research has significantly progressed in terms of recognizing the role of humans in reshaping drought risk and its socioenvironmental impacts. We note an increasing engagement with and contribution to understanding vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation patterns. Moreover, by advancing (socio)hydrological models, developing numerical indexes, and enhancing data processing, physical and engineering scientists have determined the extent of human influences in the propagation of drought hazard. However, these studies do not fully capture the complexities of anthropogenic transformations. Very often, they portray society as homogeneous, and decision-making processes as apolitical, thereby concealing the power relations underlying the production of drought and the uneven distribution of its impacts. The resistance in engaging explicitly with politics and social power-despite their major role in producing anthropogenic droughtcan be attributed to the strong influence of positivist epistemologies in engineering and physical sciences. We suggest that an active engagement with critical social sciences can further theorizations of drought risk by shedding light on the structural and historical systems of power that engender every socioenvironmental transformation.

The challenges of dynamic vulnerability and how to assess it

“…As human-environment interactions are important in the development of disasters, vulnerability cannot be viewed as static and should be assessed in a dynamic way. The social sciences have long recognized this non-static nature of vulnerability (Collins, 2008;Cutter et al, 2000;Hewitt 1983;Oliver-Smith 2002;Savelli et al, 2022;Wisner and Luce 1993). Nonetheless, the dynamics of vulnerability have not been mainstreamed yet in disaster risk assessments.…”

Documentary evidence of urban droughts and their impact in the eastern Netherlands: the cases of Deventer and Zutphen, 1500–1795

“…Worldwide, droughts of varying severity affect societies, whether on an agricultural, hydrological, or on wider socio-economic level, which is expected to increase within the current trends of climatic change (Kchouk et. al., 2021;Savelli et. al., 2022;Spinoni et.…”

Theorizing the "Social" in Socio-Hydrology: Incorporating Ethnographic Methods to Characterize Coupled Human-Water Systems in Rural Colombia

“…Too narrow of a focus on quantifiable human behavior may cause socio-hydrologists to overlook the more interesting, qualitative ways that people depend on, utilize, modify, make decisions about, and respond to changes in hydrological systems. These ongoing theoretical discussions on the fundamental epistemological differences between hydrology and qualitative social sciences (Savelli et al, 2022;Wesselink et al, 2017) have given rise to pluralistic "negotiated approach[es]" (Massuel et al, 2018(Massuel et al, , p. 2510) that allow different disciplines to investigate human-water systems with their own methods, analyses, and epistemologies (Di Baldassarre et al, 2021;. In other words, hydrological models and qualitative analysis can serve as discrete pieces of a larger understanding of human-water relationships.…”

“…Given that natural and social sciences often adhere to distinct epistemological frameworks, socio-hydrology could benefit from considering epistemologies that have evolved to understand social systems, not just hydrological ones. Socio-hydrology, like most natural science fields, is largely based on a positivist paradigm (Savelli et al, 2022) in which the scientific method and empirical research are used to generate "objective" data that can explain, predict, and generalize the behavior of natural (and in this case, social) systems. A positivist mindset is often accompanied by a "reductionist" perspective (Riley, 2005) that conceptualizes complex systems as functions of their foundational parts.…”