Abstract
Hydrological droughts pose a persistent threat for cities and are increasingly studied. However, this is rarely within a large-scale context, complicating comparisons between cities and potentially hampering the most efficient allocation of resources in terms of drought risk adaptation and mitigation. Here, we investigate global urban hydrological drought risk for 264 urban agglomerations across all continents for both the present time and future projections. To derive risk profiles for each agglomeration, we include components of: drought hazard (drought volume focusing on surface water deficits), exposure (urban population), vulnerability (multivariate vulnerability index), and cost (replacement of freshwater expenses). These components are dynamic in time, except for vulnerability. Most agglomerations are projected to experience an increase in drought hazard, exposure, and cost by 2050, with the most notable current and future hotspot being northern South Asia (India & Pakistan). Also, the number of agglomerations with high risk increases, whereas the number with lower risk decreases, indicating that high urban drought risk is increasing in scale over time. Our results enable a better targeting of those agglomerations that need most urgent attention in terms of drought risk solutions. It can also be used to identify agglomerations with similar drought risk profiles that could be studied in conjunction and may benefit from cooperative drought risk management strategies.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 115008 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-19 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| Journal | Environmental Research Communications |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| Early online date | 14 Nov 2023 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Nov 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors would like to thank Rebecca Ilunga, urban drought expert at C40 cities, for her expertise on local-scale urban drought events and their consequences, which she shared with us in an expert interview. We would also like to acknowledge the Water Safe Cities project, in which we developed the first version of the urban drought risk methodology, and via which we got the opportunity to talk to city-practitioners from several cities on their experience with urban hydrological drought. Lastly we want to thank both Dr Robert McDonald and Dr Zhifeng Liu for answering our complementary questions to their respective articles.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd
Funding
The authors would like to thank Rebecca Ilunga, urban drought expert at C40 cities, for her expertise on local-scale urban drought events and their consequences, which she shared with us in an expert interview. We would also like to acknowledge the Water Safe Cities project, in which we developed the first version of the urban drought risk methodology, and via which we got the opportunity to talk to city-practitioners from several cities on their experience with urban hydrological drought. Lastly we want to thank both Dr Robert McDonald and Dr Zhifeng Liu for answering our complementary questions to their respective articles.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Rebecca Ilunga | |
| Horizon 2020 Framework Programme | 101003276 |
Keywords
- disaster risk management
- drought hotspots
- global disaster risk
- hydrological drought
- urban agglomerations
- urban disaster risk
- urban drought risk