Enhancing drought monitoring and early warning by linking indicators to impacts

Monitoring and Early-Warning (M&EW) systems are crucial for reducing societal vulnerability to drought. While there are a range of extant M&EW systems globally, such systems are typically based on physical (hydro-climatic) indicators, and they have rarely been linked to societal or environmental impacts. This is the starting point for the international, transdisciplinary project DrIVER (Drought Impacts and Vulnerability thresholds in monitoring and Early warning research). This paper introduces the DrIVER project and presents early research highlights including a review of current M&EW capacities and knowledge gaps on the three continents, preliminary results of indicator-to-impact analyses and an overview of the novel social learning framework being developed by the project.