Dynamics of socioeconomic exposure, vulnerability and impacts of recent droughts in Argentina

During the last 20 years, Argentina experienced several extreme and widespread droughts in many different regions, including the core cropland areas. The most devastating recent events were recorded in the years 2006, 2009 and 2011. Reported impacts of the main events induced losses of more than 4 billion US dollars and more than 1 million persons were reported to be directly or indirectly affected. Climate projections suggest that these events will become even more severe and frequent due to an increasing atmospheric evaporative demand linked to rising temperatures due to an increasing concentration of greenhouse gases. These projections underline the need to understand the dynamics of the recent events in order to formulate appropriate mitigation and adaptation strategies. In this paper, we analyze the overall drought risk in Argentina, by taking into account recent information on drought hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Accordingly, we identified the most severe droughts in Argentina during the 2000-2015 period using a combination of drought hazard indicators and exposure layers. Three main events were identified: 1) during spring 2006 droughts peaked in the northeast of Argentina, 2) in 2009 precipitation deficits indicated a drought epicenter in the central Argentinian plains and 3) in 2011 the northern Patagonia region experienced a combination of natural disasters by severe drought conditions and a devastating volcanic eruption. Furthermore, we analyzed the dynamics of drought exposure for the population and the main economic sectors affected by municipality, i.e., agriculture and livestock production. Exposed assets to droughts have been identified with several records of drought impacts and declarations of farming emergencies. Information on drought impacts were extracted from media news, official reports (national and provincial) and entries from the DesInventar disaster loss database. We show that by combining the exposure and vulnerability with the drought intensity it is feasible to detect the likelihood of regional impacts in different sectors.

NAUMANN Gustavo;  VARGAS Walter;  MARINHO FERREIRA BARBOSA Paulo;  BLAUHUT Veit;  SPINONI Jonathan;  VOGT Juergen; 

2019-01-16

MDPI OPEN ACCESS PUBLISHING

JRC113005

2076-3263 (online),   

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3263/9/1/39,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC113005,   

10.3390/geosciences9010039 (online),