Role of drought monitoring and management in NAP implementation

Abstract

Land degradation is of great importance for sustainable livelihoods, hence the international community decided to develop a Convention that binds the countries to take measures to control land degradation process. Since, drought is a climatic feature that exacerbates land degradation, “mitigation of drought impact” was added to UNCCD. Drought is a very common phenomenon all around the world especially in those countries located in the arid and semi arid areas. Like other countries in the arid zone, the Islamic Republic of Iran suffers from drought. Researches revealed that every 2.5 years, the country experiences drought with different severities. Apart from the impacts that drought imposes on natural resources and environment, huge economic losses impact the people i.e. the amount of losses caused by drought in just rainfed crops amounted to 6% of the GDP in 2000. Drought is also one of the causes of poverty and poverty causes land degradation. Thus, in NAP formulation, drought is one of the main subjects addressed. In order to control the impacts of drought on land degradation, an integrated management model is needed. Since drought is a multi-faced phenomenon, the model should be quite comprehensive and cover hydrological, agricultural and socio-economic aspects. In order to develop the strategies to manage drought, one should be aware of drought occurrence. In this regard, lots of indices such as PDSI and SPI have been developed and many countries are using such indices appropriate to their own circumstances to measure the drought severity and the area affected. As different sectors of the community and environment suffer from drought and since impacts are not always similar, each sector may also need its own indices to monitor drought impacts precisely. Unfortunately, since drought is a slow and creeping disaster and since no clear and definite strategies to cope with drought have been developed, countries suffer a lot. Often, the approach is to go towards a fairly good crisis management system which is usually late and costly. Some models to manage drought have been developed such as 3 phase management model (before, during and after drought), 10-step drought management model and recently a more comprehensive one has been developed for the disaster management. The latter consider both crisis management and risk management while the former models lack some components of this model. Once, the model for each sector suffering from drought has been formulated, all stakeholders including managers and farmers can follow the strategies of the model leading to mitigate drought impacts and control land degradation.