Search for: All records

Climate change is often connected to an increase in weather extreme frequencies and severity, demanding an increased necessity in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, adapting to and building resilience to these changes and impacts. This happens in a background of climate variability that already impacts several climate-sensitive sectors. There is an urgent need for fit-for-purpose climate services and service professionals to support these mitigation and adaptation efforts. Co-development of climate services can enhance their usefulness (context-specific and fit for purpose), usability (easy access and handling), and usage (transfer and upscale) by ensuring appropriate and iterative engagement between climate service providers and users, development of timely, reliable and usable products, and the provision of services to users in a truly accessible manner. Achieving co-development asks for reframing and scaled-up transdisciplinary, sustained, and multidirectional approaches between a diversity of information users and providers. For these processes, it is key to also address and further minimize or overcome barriers of co-production, while supporting enabling and accelerating mechanisms, better preparation of climate services providers including National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, private actors, civil society, and academia for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work, enhanced individual and institutional capacity development and governance mechanisms. 

Abstract The 2017 flash drought arrived without early warning and devastated the U.S. northern Great Plains region comprising Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota and the adjacent Canadian Prairies. The drought led to agricultural production losses exceeding $2.6 billion in the United States, widespread wildfires, poor air quality, damaged ecosystems, and degraded mental health. These effects motivated a multiagency collaboration among academic, tribal, state, and federal partners to evaluate drought early warning systems, coordination efforts, communication, and management practices with the goal of improving resilience and response to future droughts. This essay provides an overview on the causes, predictability, and historical context of the drought, the impacts of the drought, opportunities for drought early warning, and an inventory of lessons learned. Key lessons learned include the following: 1) building partnerships during nondrought periods helps ensure that proper relationships are in place for a coordinated and effective drought response; 2) drought information providers must improve their understanding of the annual decision cycles of all relevant sectors, including, and beyond, direct impacts in agricultural sectors; and 3) ongoing monitoring of environmental conditions is vital to drought early warning, given that seasonal forecasts lack skill over the northern Great Plains.