HELP Guiding Principles for Drought Risk Management under a Changing Climate: Catalysing actions for enhancing climate resilience

Disaster risk reduction mainly focused on flood events in the past decades. However, one of the most impactful water-related climate risks to both nature and humanity is considered to be droughts, many regions in the world have already been hit hard by drought events in recent years. Drought impacts are far-reaching and include degraded ecosystems, limited availability of drinking water and loss of food production. To be better prepared for future drought events, the High-level Experts and Leaders Panel on Water and Disasters (HELP) has taken the initiative for a joint action in preparing guiding principles on drought risk management.

This action was led by Government of the Netherlands with support from Deltares and the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation. International experts over the world have contributed to this initiative and this has resulted in a set of guiding principles for operationalizing integrated drought risk management in the context of changing climate.

In this report proactive approaches, having greater emphasis on building resilience, are advocated. The report addresses the following issues:

• how climate change is modifying drought and impacting ecosystems, societies and economic sectors;
• how climate change is affecting drought preparedness and response measures by imposing the need to adapt to increasing uncertainty;
• guiding principles for preparing drought risk management plans considering the current and future climate change impacts and promoting sustainable and equitable sharing of water resources.

The report provides an overall picture of how policy makers can enable climate-resilient drought management and directs the reader to some useful capacity building tools and programmes. It does so through various illustrative case studies of climate-resilient drought management and reference to the current state-of-the-art in drought risk management knowledge and understanding.