Developing Drought Planning Components to Secure Community Resilience

Although we have made great efforts to reduce drought impacts, socio-economic damage has increased in recent years due to climate change, which has led to increasing frequency and intensity of drought. However, a community that has strong resilience to drought can recover, even from a long-lasting extreme drought, without severe damage. In the field of disaster management, resilience is the ability of a community to return to pre-disaster conditions. To ensure the resilience of a community, systematic drought planning is needed. Even though it is not possible to fully eliminate drought impacts, they can be reduced through systematic approaches such as drought planning. Drought planning requires linkages among sectoral and organizational measures to minimize vulnerabilities. In South Korea, water resources management is quite important because annual rainfall is concentrated during the summer monsoon season, so continuous monitoring and drought analysis are needed during the spring dry season. During the last several decades, the paradigm of drought response has changed and various measures have been implemented. This study analyzed the contents of the national drought plan in comparison with the state drought guidelines of the United States and lessons learned from extreme droughts in 2014–2015. In addition, we investigated how to ensure community resilience to droughts, including robustness, redundancy, rapidity, and resourcefulness. In conclusion, we proposed six essential components that form the basic framework of comprehensive regional drought planning in South Korea: monitoring, vulnerability analysis, mitigation, response, management, and updating.