Drought Management Policies in Australia

Governance and Drought Management Policies in Chile

Recent eruptions of violence around a housing estate in Macquarie Fields (Sydney) have again highlighted the complex and sometimes fragile relationships between cultural diversity, poverty and social cohesion. This case raises questions about the role of housing and housing assistance in contributing to or mediating potential community conflict – including in the most disadvantaged of neighbourhoods. For example, what is the ‘right’ mix of public tenants? How can housing be regenerated to facilitate community? What effects, positive and negative, does tenure mix have on the community more broadly? Assumptions about the answers to these questions lie at the heart of much present day housing policy and housing management practice – yet in reality there is very little systematic evidence that addresses them. This paper reports on AHURI funded research exploring the links between housing, housing assistance and a host of non-shelter outcomes, under the umbrella ‘social cohesion’. Social cohesion is a concept that describes social connectedness, taking account of economic inequalities. It is prominent in European and UK housing policy and may also provide means for better understanding and intervening in the relationship between housing, housing assistance and a host of non-shelter outcomes in Australia. The paper reviews existing evidence about the relationship between housing, housing assistance and social cohesion; presents a conceptual framework for understanding these relationships, and critiques the relevance of the social cohesion concept for housing policy in Australia. It also indicates how the empirical part of the research will proceed. The policy challenge being addressed by this research is ensuring that the best possible community outcomes are facilitated by government through the delivery of housing policy and assistance, whilst allowing for a diversity of cultures and lifestyle preferences.

This thesis investigated the current Incident Command Systems (ICS) used for disasters with intention of aiding the development of a conceptual framework to improve multi-agency disaster management and response. Although ICS have become the backbone of disaster management policy in Australia and overseas, worldwide debate over the effectiveness of ICS continues A three-phase multi-modal qualitative research method was carried out which identified both the barriers and facilitators to the current multiagency response and provided opportunities for improvements within these systems. The new conceptual framework is designed to underpin new disaster management arrangements for all agencies at all levels of management.

More than a decade on from their conception, this book reflects on the consequences of income management policies in Australia and Zealand. Drawing on a three-year study, it explores the lived experience of those for whom core welfare benefits and services are dependent on government conceptions of ‘responsible’ behaviour. It analyses whether officially claimed positive intentions and benefits of the schemes are outweighed by negative impacts that deepen the poverty and stigma of marginalised and disadvantaged groups. This novel study considers the future of this form of welfare conditionality and addresses wider questions of fairness and social justice.

Relating long-term rainfall variability to cattle population dynamics in communal rangelands and a government ranch in southern Ethiopia

Drought detection and declaration in India

Drought is a gradually creeping complex ecological challenge that affects people more than any other natural hazards by causing tremendous loss to agriculture, environment, and other sectors. Occurrence of drought is a common phenomenon in India, as it faces its manifestation once in every three to four years. Even though India has comprehensive drought management strategy however, vulnerabilities to droughts in the dry regions still persists, owing to the lack of resilience capacity of the communities. Government usually reacts to drought through relief measures that include providing subsidized food and drinking water supply, organizing fodder camps, crop-loss compensation, etc. Most of these actions are carried out in an environment of crisis management, rather than proactively working on reducing the vulnerabilities and enhancing the resilience of the rural communities, the approach which has been practiced since many years in Israel and Australia, and more recently in China. This paper reviews the policies, programs, and strategies of drought management in Israel, Australia, and China and the key learnings from best practices of these countries are offered for India to improve its approach to drought management. Development of technologically advanced means for drought monitoring and supply of timely and reliable information to people, preparedness through infrastructure development involving public private partnership, enforcing regulations for water demand management, and prompt relief measures are suggested for India.

The social experience of drought in rural Iran

Groundwater level declines are largely associated with natural processes and human activities. In particular, the drivers of groundwater change can be more complex during meteorological drought owing to human activities. However, disentangling their specific contribution remains poorly understood. By focusing on semiarid ecosystems in the northern Yellow River Basin – the Ordos – here we elucidate the impact of human activities on the propagation of meteorological droughts to groundwater systems. To comprehensively analyze groundwater variations, we employ the K-means, categorizing them into four distinct patterns. Based on the Pearson correlation coefficient analysis between standardized precipitation index (SPI) and groundwater depth (GWD), we found that the majority of lag time for GWD response to SPI is less than 3 months, and the drivers influencing GWD are classified into three categories: SPI, human activities related to SPI, and human activities unrelated to SPI. Our results reveal that both meteorological droughts and human activities jointly influence GWD across the entire region. Notably, human activities unrelated to SPI have the greatest impact in the irrigation district of Ordos, followed by the western part of Ordos and the Mu Us sandy land in central Ordos. Our findings can guide us to formulate effective drought management policies and practices in semiarid regions.

Droughts are a normal part of the climate, and they can occur in any climate regime around the world, even deserts and rainforests. Like other hazards, droughts can be characterized in terms of their severity, location, duration, and timing. Droughts can arise from a range of hydrometeorological processes that suppress precipitation and/or limit surface water or groundwater availability, creating conditions that are significantly drier than normal or otherwise limiting moisture availability to a potentially damaging extent. Drought risk management involves hazards, exposure, vulnerability and impact assessment, a drought early warning system (DEWS), and preparedness and mitigation. DEWS typically aim to track, assess, and deliver relevant information concerning climatic, hydrologic, and water supply conditions and trends. This chapter discusses some of the most commonly used drought indicators/indices that are being applied across drought-prone regions, with the goal of advancing monitoring, early warning, and information delivery systems in support of risk-based drought management policies and preparedness plans.

Drought and Underdevelopment in Bundelkhand: A Public Policty Analysis

Drought has become a dominant climate risk both around the world and in Europe, adding to the already challenging task of farming and governing the agricultural sector under climate change. Drought risk management is extremely complex. Apart from irrigation, most drought risk management options have more than one goal and may potentially have negative trade-offs with other risk management objectives. Moreover, government regulations and market mechanisms influence farmers’ decision-making. However, previous studies, both in developed and in developing countries, have predominantly focused on attitudinal and structural influencing factors on farmers’ risk management behavior. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate farmers’ decision spaces with respect to drought risk management. We address two applied research questions: (1) What are farmers’ preferred drought risk management measures? (2) From a farmer’s perspective, what are the dominant factors influencing drought risk management decisions? We find that farmers primarily think of production-based rather than financial measures with respect to drought risk management. At the same time, natural and technical constraints and enabling factors dominate their mental decision space, followed by public and private institutional aspects. This research provides a basis for the design of integrated and holistic drought risk management policy and the drought risk governance needed for sustainable use of land and water resources such as needed to address systemic risks and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, we introduce a novel approach using mental models extracted from interviews to explore cognitive representations of farmers' decision spaces. This approach has the potential to complement mainstream research using standardized surveys and behavioral models to analyze drivers of risk management.

Expert systems have been proposed for a wide range of civil engineering applications. They have been applied most successfully in situations governed by simple rules. Many civil engineering decisions, however, must be made in environments in which simple rules are not possible, but rather large amounts of data must be analyzed and evaluated. This paper presents a methodology in which an expert system shell (INSIGHT 2+) is used to evaluate and display information on drought management planning. A linear programming model is used to generate optimal operating policies as a function of numerous past drought experiences. These policies are incorporated into an expert system where the user is required to identify the degree to which the current drought situation is similar to past events. The expert system then aids the user in developing appropriate management policies based on time of year, descriptions of drought intensity, and other system characteristics.

In this paper, a methodology is presented for managing hydrological ecosystem services by taking into account the hierarchy of stakeholders involved in the decision-making process. With this in mind, a water allocation model is first used for allocating water resources to demands. Then, several ecosystem services (ESs)-based criteria are defined to evaluate hydrological ESs of water resources management policies. A set of water and environmental resources management strategies (alternatives) are defined for decision-makers, and several drought management strategies are determined to decrease the area of key crops and water demands of agricultural nodes. To model a multi-agent multi-criteria decision-making problem for managing hydrological ESs, three main steps are considered as follows:•Different ES-based criteria (i.e., economic profit, NPP,11Net Primary Productivity and ecological index) are defined, and their grade-based values are estimated.•Several strategies are defined for stakeholders at different levels.•A recursive evidential reasoning (ER) approach, which considers a hierarchical structure for decision-makers and a leader-follower game, is used to select the best strategy for each decision-maker.The applicability and efficiency of the methodology are illustrated by applying it to a real-world case study. The methodology is general and can be easily applied to other study areas.