Drought Management

Abstract

In 2012, the Commission carried out an overall evaluation of the policy on water scarcity and droughts introduced in the 2007 Communication. The evaluation focused on the integration of water scarcity and drought issues in the first (2009) River Basin Management Plans (RBMPs) with the aim of identifying gaps in EU drought policy and improving its implementation (the EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) requires RMBPs but not DMPs). The results revealed that the development and implementation of DMPs, and their inclusion within RBMPs, remains limited, and that countries should therefore try to integrate DMPs into the second versions of their RBMPs for 2015. Evaluation results were embedded in the Commission document, A Blueprint to Safeguard Europe’s Water (hereinafter Blueprint), adopted in 2012 (COM (2012) 673 final). Regarding water scarcity and drought in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD, 1994) found that the region suffers from “soil degradation and desertification”. Although both processes vary considerably from country to country, the vulnerability of the region to this hazard is evident and estimated to be increasing (UNCCD). In 2013, the Global Water Partnership (GWP) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) launched a joint Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP) to improve the monitoring and prevention of droughts. In the same year, the Global Water Partnership (GWP) for CEE launched the IDMP at the CEE regional level (IDMP CEE). The aim of the IDMP CEE is “to support stakeholders at all levels by providing them with policy and management guidance through globally coordinated generation of scientific information and sharing best practices and knowledge for integrated drought management”. During Phase 1 of the IDMP CEE, the overall drought situation in the 10 CEE countries of Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine was analysed. The results confirmed that drought and water scarcity issues were widely recognized as a relevant phenomenon in the CEE region. (See Inception report for the GWP CEE part of the WMO/GWP Integrated Drought Management Programme, J. Kindler, D. Thalmeinerova, 2012) Following up on this first phase, Activity 1.2 of the IDMP CEE assessed the integration of drought issues into the first RBMPs. The results of a questionnaire survey, completed by the ten CEE countries listed above, and summarised in the Report on review of the current status of implementation of the drought management plans and measures (Fatulova, 2014), showed that the actual situation for DMP development within the region is unsatisfactory. The majority of the countries had not produced a DMP in accordance with the general WFD guidelines provided in the WFD Technical report Drought Management Plan Report Including Agricultural, Drought Indicators and Climate Change Aspects (hereinafter the Report 2007). Furthermore, substantial shortcomings were found in the implementation of all key elements of the DMPs, namely, indicators and thresholds establishing different drought stages, measures to be taken in each drought stage, and the organizational framework for drought management. (Note that while neither Moldova nor Ukraine are part of the EU, both are part of the GWP CEE region and are EU accession countries, and both expressed their interest to join this programme and prepare DMPs according to the WFD.)