Evaluating the impacts of Payment for Ecosystem Services interventions
September 22, 2019PEAT REWETTING PROJECT SAVES 3 MIO. t CO2 PER YEAR
November 21, 2019Drought events pose a threat to crop productivity, can cause socioeconomic impacts such as decreased farmer income, and may even result in the need for international food aid. While several drought information and early warning systems are operational, they do not typically make use of the information available across scientific fields and tend to rely on simple indicators which only describe either agricultural, meteorological or hydrological drought alone. Information on socioeconomic factors that strongly affect drought impacts are also rarely considered, despite their importance.
TOWARDS MULTIDISCIPLINARY SOLUTIONS
GlobeDrought is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and supports the research conducted by RSS GmbH, five university working groups and the Welthungerhilfe. GlobeDrought combines spatially explicit, historical information on drought hazard, exposure and vulnerability from meteorological, agricultural, hydrological and socioeconomic sources to provide reliable and comprehensive information on drought risk at a global level. Find out more about the project by visiting the GlobeDrought project website.
DROUGHT PORTAL & FUTURE OUTLOOK
This week, partners from JRC’s GDO, UNCCD and WWF joined the GlobeDrought consortium to discuss the current status of global drought monitoring, best practices and the possibility of future cooperation between organizations. The prototype online portal currently hosting GlobeDrought’s results was also presented to the group as part of the talks and will soon be accessible online.
Part of GlobeDrought’s mandate is also to spread information among the scientific and general community about drought management and awareness. A free online course was established for this purpose, consisting of multiple learning blocks. Each block contains an online lecture to lay the foundations for and introduce each topic before launching a live webinar on the same content. These lectures, resources and more information on drought can be found here, free-of-charge
Workshop participants (Photo: UNU-EHS/Gonzales)