Enhanced situational awareness for crisis management
Understanding and acting on future risks and opportunities
The Drought Observatories are financed by the Copernicus project under the Emergency topic.
Additional projects focussing on capacity building, enhancing our information platform and collaboration with counterparts around the world are presented on this page.
Intra-ACP Climate Services
This project is financed by DG INTPA and focusses on capacity building. The project is executed by 6 scientific teams in the JRC each partnering with colleagues in their domain. The Drought team provides in this project technical support to regional meteorological services in the ACP (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific) Countries. Guideline for the project was the successful development together with CIIFEN in Ecuador of a Open-Source Drought Observatory called SCADO (South, Central American Drought Observatory) that resulted from the EuroCLIMA project. We partner with ICPAC (IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Centre) in Kenya to implement a open source based web-map server connected to a large spatial database, while creating the system specifications together. The new system is called DroughtWatch. The result of this collaboration allows to improve the robustness of the Global Drought Observatory (GDO) providing higher resolution information and knowledge and with the development of new indices specified by African scientists. Recently also the African Center of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD) joined this initiative. A cloudtechnology based platform African Drought Advisory is under development and expected to be in production by the end of 2023.
IDMP CEE
The Global Water Partnership (GWP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) launched a joint Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP) in 2013 to improve monitoring and prevention of drought in various parts of the world – among them also in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), which is seriously vulnerable to drought. The vulnerability to this natural hazard alerted the public, governments and operational agencies in the CEE to many socio-economic problems accompanying water shortage. Whether due to natural climate variability or climate change, there is an urgent need to develop better drought monitoring and management systems, as well as a broader proactive social response to manage drought risks.
The scope of IDMP is “to support stakeholders at all levels by providing them with policy and management guidance through the globally coordinated generation of scientific information and sharing best practices and knowledge for integrated drought management”. At the planning and implementation level, the primary beneficiaries of the program are government institutions and agencies responsible for developing drought management policies and/or implementing systems for drought monitoring and prediction and drought risk mitigation and response at multiple time scales and regional, national and local spatial scales. The secondary beneficiaries are decision-makers and managers whose task is to implement these policies, including drought mitigation and adaptation. These beneficiaries also include non-governmental institutions involved in regional and national drought advocacy, awareness and response efforts.
IDMP CEE also promotes EDO as European drought data exchange platform. More on IDMP CEE can be found at www.gwp.org/GWP-CEE/IDMPCEE/.
EDORA
The European Drought Observatory for Resilience and Adaptation (EDORA) is an initiative of the European Parliament financing research on the impacts of Drought in Europe. The EDORA project, managed by the Directorate of the Environment of the European Commission, aims at strengthening the European Drought Observatory (EDO), hosted by the Joint Research Centre (JRC), by enhancing drought risk assessment at different scales, aggregating data on impacts in different sectors, and fostering connections and establishment of drought observatories in the Member States. These actions will ultimately enhance the resilience and adaptation to drought across the EU, by offering a common core of operational data and knowledge about droughts.
The project page of EDORA can be visited here https://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/edora