Quantifying Socio-Economic Droughts: Applications to California, and Southeastern Australia

Abstract:

Reservoirs are one of the main infrastructures that provide resilience against extremes (e.g., floods and droughts) and they play a key role in water resources management. Although man-made reservoirs have an enormous impact on water distribution throughout the year, the most common drought indicators do not consider reservoir information. Furthermore, most water availability and climate change impact studies ignore the role of reservoirs. Water availability cannot be properly assessed without a thorough assessment of reservoir conditions, including socio-economic demand. By combining classical methods for climate variability assessment (top-down approach) and societal resilience assessment (bottom-up approach), this study offers a hybrid framework that integrates different drivers of water stress. The index is termed the Multivariate Standardized Reliability and Resilience Index (MSRRI). By looking at the adaptive capacity of the reservoirs to climatic variability, this index considers both meteorological and socio-economic droughts. We investigated the 2014 California drought and Australia’s Millennium drought using MSRRI considering major reservoirs that provide water to California and southeastern Australia. This presentation reviews recent findings and discusses reservoir conditions and socio-economic drought information in California and southeastern Australia using MSRRI.