Climate adaptation, Community engagement and collaboration
Developing a Tool to Help Decision-Makers Navigate Complex Drought Scenarios
Case Study by Conservation and Adaptation Resources Toolbox and the Drought Learning Network
Status
Completed

Location

States

Wyoming

Subject

Climate change
Drought

Introduction

A map of the western US with labeled points in several states
Image Details

Intense periods of drought across the western U.S. present severe threats to a wide range of shareholders tasked with managing natural resources. In an era of intensifying human-driven climate change climate change
Climate change includes both global warming driven by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases and the resulting large-scale shifts in weather patterns. Though there have been previous periods of climatic change, since the mid-20th century humans have had an unprecedented impact on Earth's climate system and caused change on a global scale.

Learn more about climate change , the severity and frequency of these droughts will likely increase (Cravens et al., 2021). While managing water is a critical approach to mitigating and responding to drought, water management does not encompass the wide array of impacts, management strategies, and shareholders related to drought management. For example, aridification from lack of precipitation has agricultural and natural resource implications. 

Effective drought response involves interdisciplinary collaboration and the expertise and experience of diverse actors including private landowners, business owners, scientists, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and managers and policymakers within Tribal, local, state, and federal government agencies. However, it is not clear how their differing professional, cultural, educational, and jurisdictional expertise can complicate collaboration. 

A team of researchers funded by the Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs) sought to understand the strengths, weaknesses, and outcomes of these interdisciplinary collaborations to understand how and why the diverse actors involved in making decisions about drought take certain actions. Their analysis resulted in a typology to support actors navigating complex drought management projects that accounts for multiple scales and dynamics of drought choices. Typologies help capture important aspects of a concept, process, activity, or network (Cravens et al., 2021) to provide a high-level understanding of that concept, process, activity, or network. Without a drought decision-making typology, issues that arise from complexity and subject-matter discrepancies may remain unchecked. Using a typology, actors can streamline the process of understanding the complexity of their drought issue and correct potential stakeholder exclusion, unexpected impacts, or partner misunderstandings early in project/management plan development phases. 

Key Issues Addressed

From the start of drought management projects, it can be hard to know how various drought factors interact, such as how a decision might impact individuals not involved in the project, leaving key actors out of decision-making processes. For instance, a National Park Service manager planning for drought could be constrained by the amount of water released upstream by the Bureau of Reclamation. 

How actors define the drought issue, and thus how one might respond, differs. For instance, actors might approach drought and its impacts based on the resources they manage and their management goals. Many drought management collaborations lack a collaboratively agreed-upon definition of drought, its impacts, and actions to address them. This lack of a collaboratively defined definition of drought may result from actors feeling ‘siloed’ into their own area of expertise. People with different expertise may expect others in similar situations to hold the same knowledge of drought issues, and therefore not feel inclined to make their specific knowledge or collaborative expectations understood. As such, collaborating actors may move from a false assumption of shared understanding. While typologies describing climate vulnerability, climate adaptation, and water governance exist, none focus specifically on drought.

Project Goals

  • Identify the social, institutional, cultural, and/or economic factors influencing drought management, preparedness, and/or response.
  • Understand both the differences and commonalities in ways actors conceptualize drought decision-making.
  • Create a typology to help collaborations develop a shared mental model for approaching drought management and decisions together.

Project Highlights

Social Learning: Typologies have the power to guide collaborators to contribute their different perspectives to a project, creating group knowledge over time.

Interdisciplinary Approach: By synthesizing both workshop conversations and an analysis of ten case studies, team members could connect decision-making factors discussed among workshop attendees with real-world examples from case studies to ground their analyses. Workshops convened social and natural scientists and practitioners, while case studies came from various geographies across the western US. This approach provided team members with a wide range of expertise and context to explore drought decision-making scenarios.

Themes to GuideConceptualization: The team developed the typology to reflect four themes that emerged from analysis: problem framing; decision-makers; the actions, decisions, and outcomes; and the dynamic of the decision-making space, including both the relationships among actors and the scales at which they are operating. 

Evolution to Guidebook: This work prompted the development of a guidebook to help actors rapidly assess the social dimensions of drought, some of which are not always incorporated into drought or resource management plans, especially if drought is conceptualized as only an ecological issue. The guide describes the unique problems of drought (e.g., its slow onset and long duration) to help actors define it, nine key social elements of drought (e.g., economics and livelihoods), and two hypothetical examples of how this guide can be used. 

Lessons Learned

A flow chart of the drought decision making typology, color-coded
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While typologies provide insight into how to think systematically, they cannot capture every factor that is influential in a system. Thus, typologies risk excluding critical details. Further, the typology does not provide causal explanations as to how social factors, like politics, might affect a decision. However, the typology aids thought processes to identify a more comprehensive list of factors and prompt deliberation of potential impacts. 

The team developed the typology with the intention of broad application. Not only can actors apply it across diverse geographies, but it can aid in bridging disciplines necessary for drought management. For instance, with the typology’s inclusion of social and institutional aspects, it can aid natural scientists to think about factors outside their wheelhouse and reveal where additional partner expertise could complement their efforts.

The guidebook is not a prescriptive list of methods, but rather offers flexible approaches to fit the specific context. Much like a travel guide that does not fully plan a tourist’s trip, the guidebook provides information for practitioners and researchers to make faster, informed decisions. 

Next Steps

  • Encourage others to build upon the typology based on their geographical or experiential context
  • Pursue developing different types of typologies, such as explanatory typologies that provide causal explanations for decisions

Funding Partners

Resources

Contacts

  • Amanda Cravens, U.S. Geological Survey - Fort Collins Science Center: aecravens@usgs.gov
  • Michael Hayes, University of Nebraskas, Lincoln - National Drought Mitigation Center: mhayes2@unl.edu

CART Lead Authors

  • Sam Cohen, student writer, CART 

  • Maude Dinan, USDA Southwest Climate Hub: mdinan@nmsu.edu

The DLN is a peer-to-peer knowledge exchange between climate service providers and resource managers, created to gather and share lessons learned from drought events to prepare for future events. The DLN partners with CART to develop Case Studies, with funding from the National Drought Mitigation Center for interns and coordination support from the USDA Southwest Climate Hub.

Suggested Citation

Cohen, S., Dinan, M. (2023). “Developing a Tool to Help Decision-Makers Navigate Complex Drought Scenarios.” CART. Retrieved from https://www.fws.gov/project/tool-help-navigate-complex-drought-scenarios.

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