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Historically, flooding has dominated the physical and political landscape of Somerset—particularly over the winter of 2013/2014 when a devastating and high profile flood hit the region. However, the area is also sensitive to drought and water scarcity (D&WS) events—with the region being on the precipice of an increasingly severe drought throughout...
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Purpose
This paper aims to describe an in-depth study conducted on transition of recovery into subsequent recovery phases after the 2010 super floods in the Sindh province of Pakistan. The objectives of this research were to examine the post-disaster activities after the floods and highlight the critical areas hindering the transition into an effec...
Managed retreat involves the relocation of structures or abandonment of land to manage natural-hazard risk. In the USA, a number of towns have completed or are planning partial or complete relocations. This study focuses on a subset of these towns located in the US Midwest, each relocated out of FEMA designated flood zones to mitigate riverine floo...
Flooding and drought are two of the most common environmental problems in Andir Urban Village due to its location near a tributary of the Citarum River, its concave geographic structure, and excessive groundwater usage. Traditional approaches that focus on constructing water management structures cannot provide a sustainable solution to these persi...
How have property buyouts and disaster recovery assistance programs been implemented in Canadian communities? This paper compares contrasting policies and programs in two Canadian jurisdictions, Pointe Gatineau, Quebec and Constance Bay, Ontario—both of which experienced major flooding from the Ottawa River in 2017 and 2019. The floods highlighted...
Citations
... For catchments with high groundwater storage, the ensemble mean indicates decreased drought duration, likely because of increases of winter and spring precipitation. These findings highlight the susceptibility to multi-year droughts, whereby a dry winter/spring increases the risk of extreme droughts given the large scale summer drying indicated by the ensemble mean (Browne et al., 2016;Van der Wiel et al., 2022). ...
Hydrometeorological droughts are complex hazards expressed through the relative deviation in water availability relative to long‐term average conditions. The development and propagation of drought is governed by hydrological processes at different spatial scales including precipitation, evapotranspiration, overland flow, soil moisture, groundwater storage and discharge. Detailed investigation is thus required to evaluate associated linkages among various types of hydrometeorological drought to understand the likely impacts of climate change on drought characteristics (magnitude, frequency, duration and propagation). This study explores the impact of climate change on hydrometeorological drought for 10 Irish catchments, using standardized drought indices representing different components of the hydrological system. We employ 12 Global Climate Models from the Coupled Model Inter‐comparison Project phase 6 (CMIP6), forced with SSP370 and bias corrected to catchment conditions to force a conceptual hydrological model to generate hydrological projections for each catchment. The results indicate substantial drying during summer with associated increases in summer drought magnitude and frequency. However, simulations show a wide range of change, especially for hydrological drought (discharge and baseflow). Only modest changes in the magnitude and frequency of hydrological drought events were found, with increases in winter and spring precipitation offsetting summer dryness. Similarly, the probability of meteorological drought propagating to hydrological events (Standardized Streamflow Index/Standardized Baseflow Index), shows modest increases under the climate change projections considered. Findings highlight that drought, especially during summer are a critical climate change risk for adaptation.
... The unit of the analysis is the context formed by governance dimensions and qualities of each case study. For each of the five cases a paper has been written and published [19][20][21][22][23]. The authors of this paper contributed to the first three Dutch cases, while the fourth and fifths cases were part of the DROP (Benefits of Governance in Draught Adaptation) project in the frame of EU Interreg IVB programme, in which the first and the second author participated and contributed to as well. ...
... Somerset county, which is among UK's most significant peat wetland natural environments, emerged by co-existence of agriculture and water/environmental management [19,30]. The area is sensitive to both serious floods and droughts. ...
... The area is sensitive to both serious floods and droughts. Resilience in the area is threatened by shifts between extreme events within one year, e.g., shift from drought to flood events, like the great winter floods of 2013-2014 [19]. ...
This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the governance systems of nature areas in relation to resilience measures in the field of water and nature management. The main question is to identify the key characteristics of governance that influence the resilience of the selected areas. The purpose of this comparative study is to understand and explain how aspects within the governance context influence the success of policy initiatives or measures towards resilience goals. For comparison, the hierarchic method is used. The results of the five case studies are compared: four cases from the Netherlands and one from UK. For the assessment of the governance of selected areas the governance assessment tool is used to systematically assess the relevant elements and qualities of the governance contexts and to understand the circumstances for the implementation of adaptive measures. The results of the comparison reveal different combinations of the governance qualities creating, to some extent, the setting for the resilience of the areas in which external factors and continuous interaction between layers of the governance system influence the adaptive capacity of the governance to manage resilience.
... for instance, the agreements on water quantity can be revisited, with a special focus on preventing possible bottlenecks. somerset, uK Browne et al. (2016) Maintain collaboration to overcome broader governance failures: the lead actors should continue collaborating with the widest possible range of stakeholders. this will ensure they represent a diverse set of stakeholder views, when adaptation policies are developed, and avoiding broader governance failures that ingrain fragmented views of resilience. ...
With the motivation to improve the understanding on the national and local levels of governance, this chapter focuses on the actors at these two levels, such as ministries, provincial and municipal authorities, and non‐governmental organizations (NGOs). It specifically aims to create insights into the involvement of these actors in the design, implementation, and evaluation of drought resilience measures, and seeks to identify recommendations to improve this involvement. The chapter presents a comparative review of the six cases that were included within the scope of the ‘DROP’ (Benefits of governance in DROught adaptation) project. The geographical boundaries of the case studies included in the DROP project and compared in the chapter cover sub‐national ‘regions’ that consists of several cities or towns. Amongst the six cases, the only case that covers a formally defined jurisdictional region is the Belgian case, where Flanders is examined as an entire federal region.
Droughts have severe impacts on the economy, society, and environment. They also have impacts on groundwater and vice versa. While most analyses consider drought and groundwater as disconnected, we argue that drought and groundwater management should be conjunctively considered. This article presents some key interconnections, identifies challenges, and discusses illustrative policy responses. We highlight several advancements found in international scientific research and describe future directions for drought and groundwater management. While many technological innovations have improved our understanding of drought and groundwater’s complex nature, policy and governance advances have not kept pace.
How societies can cope with flood risk along coasts and riverbanks is a critical theoretical and empirical problem-particularly in the wake of anthropogenic climate change and the increased severity of floods. An example of this challenge is the growing costs of publicly-funded flood defense in Britain and popular outcries during the regular occasions that the British government fails to protect property and land during heavy rains. Traditional approaches to institutional analysis suggest that flood management is either a public good that only the government is competent to provide or a private good to which individual landowners are ultimately responsible for supplying. We argue that an important cause of failure in flood management is mismatched property rights. This is where the scale of natural events and resources fail to align with the scale of human activities, responsibility and ownership. Moreover, the spatial dimensions of floods mean that their management is often appropriately conceptualized as a common pool resource problem. As a result, commons institutions as conceptualized and observed by Elinor Ostrom are likely to be major contributors to effective flood management. What governance process should decide the size and scope of these institutions? We argue that bottom-up responses to problems of mismatched property rights are facilitated within larger societies that are characterized by market processes. Moreover, the wider presence of price signals delivers to local communities essential knowledge about the cost of maintaining private property and the relative scarcity of the communal goods. We discuss how our theoretical positions align with experience in Britain and what the implications of our theoretical approach are for facilitating the development of better institutions.
This chapter discusses the strategies that are of importance in the development of policy responses to the water‐scarcity issues. Different packages of measures are possible to increase resilience towards drought. Three general strategies can be discerned. These strategies are reactive, preventive, and adaptive. Each of these strategies can be coupled with types of measure. To improve the evaluation of past experiences, for the development of a more long‐term orientation, and the involvement of all stakeholders and their interests, people need to increase their consciousness of the natural conditions and socio‐economic factors that affect water utilization patterns and the problems of drought and water scarcity that might result. This leads to a fourth necessary strategy that can be labelled as supportive measures, consisting mostly of research and communication measures. The chapter elaborates the taxonomy of drought measures and gives several examples.
This chapter proposes an analysis of the water and drought governance contexts in case studies of two countries of North West Europe (NWE) that have been jointly impacted during the past severe droughts, France and the United Kingdom (UK) with respectively two case studies: the Vilaine catchment in French Brittany, and the Somerset Levels and Moors in south west UK. It presents a comparative analysis of the outputs of the implementation of the Governance Assessment Tool developed by H. Bressers et al. with the Contextual Interaction Theory, the theory at the origins of the GAT. After a brief description of the two case studies, the chapter describes the methodology used to study drought governance, both the GAT as refined in the European DROP‐project for drought‐governance analysis and the Contextual Interaction Theory. It also presents the main results and discussion. The chapter further presents general conclusions for drought‐governance resilience in NWE.
Commons provide private goods that are hard to exclude from non-contributing actors. They frequently underlie mismatches in property arrangements. Hardin asserted that the existence of commons produced a ‘tragedy’ remediable through strict division of natural resources into private property or state control. Elinor Ostrom, and the Bloomington School of Political Economy, revealed instead a range of long-lived, productive and peaceful commons institutions that rely on neither a central state nor individual private property. What governance process should decide the size and scope of these institutions? We argue that bottom-up responses to problems of mismatched property rights are facilitated within larger societies that are characterized by market processes. Moreover, the wider presence of price signals deliver to local communities essential knowledge about the cost of maintaining private property and the relative scarcity of the communal goods. We illustrate our case with an example of the failure and attempted reform of flood management schemes in Great Britain.
