The About Drought Download & Handbook

Thank you to every who took part in the About Drought Download at The Royal Society on November 7th. The day could not have been such a huge success without our speakers, presenters, exhibitors, researchers and delegates. Thank you to Sir Mark Walport for an inspiring opening address and to the many users of all our outputs who bore testimony to the value and relevance of our datasets, tools and resources. We truly fulfilled our objective of bringing together all the drought resources, all the experts, all the cutting-edge data to inform the best strategic and real-time decision making in the face of our changing climate in one place. We will soon be sharing all the photos taken with a link here on the website.

We also launched the About Drought Handbook which you can read and download online by clicking on the cover image (left). Further outputs will be added over the coming weeks.

Drought and water scarcity are significant threats to livelihoods and wellbeing in the UK. Parts of the country are already water-stressed and this can only increase in the face of climate change. The prolonged dry spell in 2017-19 brought sharply into focus the societal relevance of this area of research which from science to song, has drawn on a wealth of evidence to tackle these issues.

This website hosts the outputs and decision-support resources produced by the UK Droughts & Water Scarcity Research Programme from 2014 to 2019, including compelling case studies in interviews with decision-makers who have already put our data to the test.