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The purpose of this paper is to identify, analyse and document local traditional indicators used in drought forecasting in the Mzingwane Catchment and to assess the possibility of integrating traditional rainfall forecasting, using the local traditional indicators, with meteorological forecasting methods.

Self-administered structured questionnaires were conducted on 101 respondents in four districts of the Mzingwane Catchment area, namely, Beitbridge, Mangwe, Esighodini and Mwenezi from February to August 2012. In addition, key informant interviews and focus group discussions were also used in data collection and the collected data were analysed for drought history and demographics; drought adaptation and the use of drought forecasting methods in the catchment using Statistical Package for Social Science.

The paper reveals the growing importance of precipitation forecasts among Mzingwane communities, particularly the amount, timing, duration and distribution of rainfall. Rainfall was cited as the major cause of drought by 98 per cent of the respondents in the catchment. Whilst meteorological rainfall forecasts are available through various channels, they are not readily accessible to rural communities. Furthermore, they are not very reliable at local level. The paper shows that communities in the Mzingwane Catchment still regard local traditional knowledge forecasting as their primary source of weather forecasts. The paper finds that plant phenology is widely used by the local communities in the four districts for drought forecasting. Early and significant flowering of Mopane trees (Colophospermum mopane) from September to December has been identified to be one of the signals of poor rainfall season in respect to quantity and distribution and subsequent drought. Late and less significant flowering of Umtopi trees (Boscia albitrunca) from September to December also signals a poor rainfall season.

The paper fulfils an identified need to study and document useful traditional drought indicators. Furthermore, the paper provides a platform for possible integration of traditional drought forecasting and meteorological forecasting and ensure sustainable rural livelihood development. The paper is useful to both meteorological researchers and resource-constrained communities in Mzingwane Catchment.

The purpose of this study is to assess the spatiotemporal patterns of future meteorological drought in the Yellow River Basin under different representative concentration pathway (RCP) scenarios.

Delta method is used to process the future climate data of the global climate models, then analyzed the spatiotemporal variation trend of drought in the Yellow River Basin based on standardized precipitation evaporation index (SPEI) under four RCP scenarios.

This research was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41901239), Soft Science Research Project of Henan Province (212400410077, 192400410085), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0602703), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2018M640670) and the special fund of top talents in Henan Agricultural University (30501031).

This study can provide support for future meteorological drought management and prevention in the Yellow River Basin and provide a theoretical basis for water resources management.

In many parts of the globe, drought is becoming frequent and severe. Drought is related to water and for that reason, this chapter begins by describing the movement of water on planet earth. In a second phase, the drought concept is defined and the different types of drought are identified. At the end, the impacts and the relationship between climate change and drought are described.

The Monsoon Asian region has a much wider rainfall distribution than other regions of the world. The countries in this region are characterized mostly by floods and typhoons, which result from the interplay among the ocean, the atmosphere, and the land. Thus, many factors affect the strength of the rainfall, including sea surface temperatures in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, variations in solar output, land snow cover and soil moisture over the Asian continent, and the position and strength of prevailing winds. The links between these factors and monsoons appear to wax and wane over time, and the observational record is too short to explain this longer-term variability. Precipitation and surface wind maps of Asia during the summer months of June to August show the average spatial patterns of monsoon circulation and moisture.

Hazard assessment on drought disaster is of great significance for improving drought risk management. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the drought disaster, the index values have some grey multi-source heterogeneous characteristics. The purpose of this paper is to construct a grey projection incidence model (GPIM) to evaluate the hazard of the drought disaster characterised by the grey heterogeneity information.

First, the index system of the drought hazard risk is established based on the formation mechanism of the drought disaster. Then, the GPIM for the heterogeneous panel data is constructed to assess drought hazard of five cities in Henan Province. Subsequently, based on the assessment results, the grey clustering model is employed for the regional division.

The findings demonstrate that five cities in central Henan Province are divided into three categories, which correspond to three different risk grades, respectively. With respect to different drought risk areas, corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are proposed.

This paper provides a practical and effective new method for the hazard assessment on drought disaster. Meanwhile, these countermeasures and suggestions can help policy makers to improve the efficiency of drought resistance work and reduce the losses caused by drought disasters in Henan Province.

This paper proposes a new GPIM which resolves the assessment problems of the uncertain systems with grey heterogeneous information, such as real numbers, interval grey numbers and three-parameter interval grey numbers. It not only expands the application scope of the grey incidence model, but also enriches the research of panel data.

While Erratic Distribution of Monsoon is the main cause of abnormal monsoon, the consequences of Early Withdrawal of Monsoon are generally quite serious and can create disastrous situations for the drought-prone areas of the country. It is this intrinsic variability of the rainfall over India, in both time and space that makes India, especially the drier regions thereof, vulnerable to droughts. Although no part of India is immune to the adverse impacts of drought, the arid and ,semi-arid regions in the western, northern and peninsular parts of the country experience more frequent droughts, at times leading to a crippling impact on the national economy. The Indian economy, thus, has been described as a “gamble of monsoon” (Venkateswarlu, 2010). A look at the rainfall departure¹ and the corresponding food-grain production (Table 1) in India from 2000 to 2009 reveals that in the drought years of 2002 and 2009 the All India rainfall departure was −19.2% and −21.8%, respectively, leading to a drastic fall in food-grain production by 13.4 and 6.9%, respectively, as compared to the previous years, which received good monsoon rains.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report on the regional impacts of Climate Change (IPCC, 2007a), a drastic change in rainfall patterns in the warmer climate would occur in Bangladesh, and it may experience a 5% to 6% increase of rainfall by 2030 due to glacier melting and more intense monsoons, which will create frequent large and prolonged floods as well as an increase in droughts outside the monsoon season. Furthermore, in the context of global warming, most of the climatic models project a decrease in precipitation in the dry season and an increase during the monsoon season in south Asia (Christensen et al., 2007). This will cause a combination of more extreme floods and droughts in this region. Therefore, the moderately drought-affected areas will be turned into severely drought-prone areas within next 20 to 30 years (IPCC, 2007b).

Thailand's climate is tropical; it has high temperature and humidity and is dominated by monsoons. The average rainfall, recorded from 1950 to 1997, is 1,374mm/year or equivalent to 702,610 Million Cubic Meter (MCM), which is much greater than the global average rainfall of 990mm/year. During the past 10 years, the annual rainfall has been positively deviant from the annual average (Fig. 1). In addition, results from climate-model simulations for the 21st century (Bates, Kundzewicz, Wu, & Palutikof, 2008) show that droughts should not be a problem in Thailand because of increased precipitation, soil moisture, and runoff and Thailand only experiences slight increase in evaporation. Therefore, it can be said that “droughts” change from country to country.

Of all the natural disasters, drought is the most gradual and the most hard to predict. However, this insidious disaster continually affects the lives and livelihoods of farmers living in drought-affected areas. The northwestern part of Bangladesh is recognized as being more severely affected by drought than the rest of the country, as drought is a recurring event in this area. It has substantial impacts on agriculture and causes great suffering for farmers – in particular, poor and small farmers, who are more vulnerable to drought. Therefore, this study tries to illustrate farmers’ existing coping practices with regard to drought. It also addresses their prioritized adaptation practices, which are based on local context and available resources. This study not only focuses on the implementation of these adaptation practices from the national to the local level, but it also mentions various roles of stakeholders and a definite timeframe for each adaptation practice.