Drought and society: Scientific progress, blind spots, and future prospects

Area of Science:

• Physical and engineering sciences, climate, history, society, and culture.

Background:

• Human activities intensify drought severity, frequency, and impacts globally.
• Drought risk conceptualizations increasingly incorporate human actions and natural system interactions.
• Physical and engineering sciences review how social processes influence drought risk production and distribution.

Purpose of the Study:

• To examine the extent to which physical and engineering sciences account for social processes in drought risk.
• To identify progress and limitations in these disciplines regarding anthropogenic drought.
• To suggest integrating critical social sciences for a more comprehensive understanding of drought risk.

Main Methods:

• Review of literature focusing on physical and engineering sciences' engagement with social processes in drought risk.
• Analysis of how (socio)hydrological models, numerical indexes, and data processing address human influences.
• Examination of the portrayal of society and decision-making in drought research.

Main Results:

• Significant progress in recognizing human roles in reshaping drought risk and socioenvironmental impacts.
• Increasing engagement with vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation patterns.
• Advancements in modeling and data processing quantify human influences on drought hazard propagation.
• Limitations identified: portrayal of homogeneous societies and apolitical decision-making, obscuring power relations.

Conclusions:

• Physical and engineering sciences have advanced drought risk understanding but often simplify social complexities.
• Positivist epistemologies may hinder explicit engagement with politics and social power.
• Collaboration with critical social sciences is recommended to address structural power systems in socioenvironmental transformations and drought risk.