Evaluating Responses to Drought

Responses in Developed Countries (HICs)

• In developed countries, the response to a drought is often high-cost and relies on state-wide government intervention.
• For example, during the 2011–2017 California drought, the agricultural industry lost approximately $5 billion, and 17,100 agricultural workers lost their jobs.
• In response, the government mandated a 25% reduction in city water use and introduced fines for excessive watering.
• HICs frequently use demand-side management (strategies aimed at reducing consumer need).
• This includes water meters, hosepipe bans, or paying residents to replace lawns with desert plants—a process known as xeriscaping.
• These policies often trigger stakeholder conflict: farmers rely on heavy water use for crop irrigation, residents want unrestricted water for lifestyle choices (like swimming pools and gardens), while environmentalists demand strict usage limits to protect ecosystem health.

High-Tech Solutions: Desalination

• Wealthier nations can afford hard engineering projects, which are large-scale, capital-intensive infrastructure solutions.
• Desalination is the process of removing salt from seawater to create freshwater, using methods like reverse osmosis.
• Sydney's desalination plant cost $1.8 billion and provides 15% of the city's water.
• While highly effective at increasing supply, desalination is five times more expensive than conventional water sources.
• Environmentally, it produces brine, a toxic salty waste product that harms marine ecosystems, and fish larvae are often sucked into the intake pipes.
• This creates further stakeholder conflict: governments favour desalination to support economic growth, whereas environmentalists strongly oppose its high energy consumption and marine pollution.

Vulnerability in Developing Nations (LICs/NEEs)

• In emerging and developing countries, drought impacts are measured in severe human loss rather than just financial loss.
• Populations relying on subsistence farming face severe food insecurity, famine, and forced rural-to-urban migration when crops fail.
• By July 2011, a severe drought in Ethiopia left 4.5 million people facing an acute food security crisis.
• Later, during the 2015 Ethiopia drought (worsened by the El Niño weather pattern), the government allocated over $100 million for emergency food and water.
• Immediate responses often depend heavily on international aid (transfer of resources from donors), such as the USA providing $128.4 million in emergency food aid to Ethiopia in 2015.

Small-Scale and Sustainable Responses

• Developing nations often benefit most from intermediate technology—low-cost, sustainable equipment suited to local skills.
• Crucially, intermediate technology does NOT require expensive imported parts or specialized foreign engineers to operate and maintain.
• These projects usually use a bottom-up approach, meaning they are led by local communities or NGOs rather than national governments.
• In Kenya, concrete sand dams trap up to 40 million litres of water in sand spaces, filtering out bacteria and preventing evaporation.
• In Burkina Faso, stone lines called bunds slow runoff and increase soil moisture, which has successfully boosted millet crop yields by 50%.

Evaluating the Best Approach

• Evaluating drought responses requires judging if they are socially acceptable, economically affordable, and environmentally harmless.
• HIC top-down strategies: Desalination is reliable and weather-independent (pro), but it does NOT rely on renewable energy, leading to a high carbon footprint and toxic pollution (con).
• LIC bottom-up strategies: Intermediate technologies like gravity-fed pipe schemes (e.g., the Hitosa project in Ethiopia) are highly socially sustainable as they provide 25L of water per day and empower local women by reducing travel time (pro). However, they are limited in scale, cannot supply rapidly growing urban populations, and initially rely on external NGO funding rather than domestic resources (con).
• Balanced Judgement: There is no single perfect solution. HICs can afford expensive, large-scale supply methods, but these are often environmentally unsustainable. For LICs, small-scale water conservation is highly sustainable locally, but emergency international aid remains essential to prevent loss of life during severe, prolonged droughts.