Reconciling drought vulnerability assessment using a convergent approach: Application toWater Security in the Elqui River basin, North-Central Chile

Abstract

Drought has been, is and most likely will remain one of the most significant socio-natural disasters affecting society and the environment worldwide. One priority objective in the adoption of national drought policies is to promote standardized approaches to vulnerability assessment. To reach this objective, however, there is a need to address the noticeable lack of reconciliation between the two major epistemic frameworks that have been used to determine who is vulnerable and why: the so-called outcome and contextual frameworks. This study presents a novel procedure called the convergent approach to assess drought vulnerability under an integral framework. The procedure has been applied to the study of the vulnerability of water security to drought in water-use sectors in a basin located in north-central Chile. The study is justified by the role that drought plays as the major threat to water security in a context of global water crisis. The results show that the convergent approach outperforms traditional procedures such as those based on composite indicators, showing sound robustness and reaching sufficient levels of reliability and validity. The potential expansion of this approach to other applications, such as those related to global estimations of vulnerability to drought, is also discussed.