The Iolanda water treatment plant provides the water supply for utilities in Zambia’s capital Lusaka, which depends on hydropower from the Kafue Gorge dam to operate. When water levels are low, it causes power shortages, which in turn affect the city’s water supply. Climate Risk Informed Decision Analysis (CRIDA), an approach that analyses risk through a process called decision scaling, helped identify strategies for Iolanda.
Though droughts are natural events, there is an increasing understanding of how humans have amplified their severity and worsened their effects on both the environment and human populations. Humans have altered both meteorological droughts through human-induced climate change and hydrological droughts through management of water movement and processes within a landscape, such as by diverting rivers or changing land use. In the Anthropocene (the ongoing period in which humans are the dominant influence on climate and the environment), droughts are closely entwined with human actions, cultures and responses.
This series of videos explains the effects of drought all around the world through the presentation of case studies.
They are the result of the work of UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme (IHP) in partnership with GRID-Arendal, the University of Southampton and the U.S. National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).
