Review article: Drought as a continuum – memory effects in interlinked hydrological, ecological, and social systems

作者：Anne F. Van Loon, Sarra Kchouk, Alessia Matanó, Faranak Tootoonchi, Camila Álvarez-Garretón, Khalid Elnour Ali Hassaballah, Minchao Wu, Marthe Wens, Anastasiya Shyrokaya, Elena Ridolfi, Riccardo Biella, Viorica Nagavciuc, Marlies H. Barendrecht, Ana Bastos, Louise Cavalcante, Franciska T. de Vries, Margaret Garcia, Johanna Mård, Ileen Streefkerk, Claudia Teutschbein, Roshanak Tootoonchi, Ruben Weesie, Valentin Aich, Juan Pablo Boisier, Giuliano Di Baldassarre, Yiheng Du, Mauricio Galleguillos, René Dario Garreaud, Monica Ionita-Scholz, Sina Khatami, Johanna Koehler, Charles H. Luce, Shreedhar Maskey, Heidi D. Mendoza, Moses Mwangi, Ilias G. Pechlivanidis, Germano Ribeiro Neto, Tirthankar Roy, Robert Stefański, Patricia Trambauer, Elizabeth A. Koebele, Giulia Vico, Micha Werner · 发表于：Natural hazards and earth system sciences · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.5194/nhess-24-3173-2024 · 被引用次数：94 · 研究领域：Hydrology and Drought Analysis、Climate variability and models、Hydrology and Watershed Management Studies

Abstract. Droughts are often long-lasting phenomena, without a distinct start or end and with impacts cascading across sectors and systems, creating long-term legacies. Nevertheless, our current perceptions and management of droughts and their impacts are often event-based, which can limit the effective assessment of drought risks and reduction of drought impacts. Here, we advocate for changing this perspective and viewing drought as a hydrological–ecological–social continuum. We take a systems theory perspective and focus on how “memory” causes feedback and interactions between parts of the interconnected systems at different timescales. We first discuss the characteristics of the drought continuum with a focus on the hydrological, ecological, and social systems separately, and then we study the system of systems. Our analysis is based on a review of the literature and a study of five cases: Chile, the Colorado River basin in the USA, northeast Brazil, Kenya, and the Rhine River basin in northwest Europe. We find that the memories of past dry and wet periods, carried by both bio-physical (e.g. groundwater, vegetation) and social systems (e.g. people, governance), influence how future drought risk manifests. We identify four archetypes of drought dynamics: impact and recovery, slow resilience building, gradual collapse, and high resilience–big shock. The interactions between the hydrological, ecological, and social systems result in systems shifting between these types, which...