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PurposeThis paper applies the theory of cascading, interconnected and compound risk to the practice of preparing for, managing, and responding to threats and hazards. Our goal is to propose a consistent approach for managing major risk in urban systems by bringing together emergency management, organisational resilience, and climate change adaptation.Design/methodology/approachWe develop a theory-building process using an example from the work of the Greater London Authority in the United Kingdom. First, we explore how emergency management approaches systemic risk, including examples from of exercises, contingency plans and responses to complex incidents. Secondly, we analyse how systemic risk is integrated into strategies and practices of climate change adaptation. Thirdly, we consider organisational resilience as a cross cutting element between the approaches.FindingsLondon has long been a champion of resilience strategies for dealing with systemic risk. However, this paper highlights a potential for integrating better the understanding of common points of failure in society and organisations, especially where they relate to interconnected domains and where they are driven by climate change.Originality/valueThe paper suggests shifting toward the concept of operational continuity to address systemic risk and gaps between Emergency Management, Organizational Resilience and Climate Change Adaptation.

The 2017 flash drought arrived without early warning and devastated the U.S. northern Great Plains region comprising Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota and the adjacent Canadian Prairies. The drought led to agricultural production losses exceeding $2.6 billion in the United States, widespread wildfires, poor air quality, damaged ecosystems, and degraded mental health. These effects motivated a multiagency collaboration among academic, tribal, state, and federal partners to evaluate drought early warning systems, coordination efforts, communication, and management practices with the goal of improving resilience and response to future droughts. This essay provides an overview on the causes, predictability, and historical context of the drought, the impacts of the drought, opportunities for drought early warning, and an inventory of lessons learned. Key lessons learned include the following: 1) building partnerships during nondrought periods helps ensure that proper relationships are in place for a coordinated and effective drought response; 2) drought information providers must improve their understanding of the annual decision cycles of all relevant sectors, including, and beyond, direct impacts in agricultural sectors; and 3) ongoing monitoring of environmental conditions is vital to drought early warning, given that seasonal forecasts lack skill over the northern Great Plains.

Flash droughts are a recently recognized type of extreme event distinguished by sudden onset and rapid intensification of drought conditions with severe impacts. They unfold on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales (weeks to months), presenting a new challenge for the surge of interest in improving subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction. Here we discuss existing prediction capability for flash droughts and what is needed to establish their predictability. We place them in the context of synoptic to centennial phenomena, consider how they could be incorporated into early warning systems and risk management, and propose two definitions. The growing awareness that flash droughts involve particular processes and severe impacts, and probably a climate change dimension, makes them a compelling frontier for research, monitoring and prediction. Flash droughts, which develop over the course of weeks, are difficult to forecast given the current state of subseasonal-to-seasonal prediction. This Perspective offers operational and research definitions, places them in the broader context of climate and suggests avenues for future research.

There is growing awareness among governments, businesses, and the general public of risks arising from changes to our climate on time scales from months through to decades. Some climatic changes could be unprecedented in their harmful socioeconomic impacts, while others with adequate forewarning and planning could offer benefits. There is therefore a pressing need for decision-makers, including policy-makers, to have access to and to use high-quality, accessible, relevant, and credible climate information about the past, present, and future to help make better-informed decisions and policies. We refer to the provision and use of such information as climate services. Established programs of research and operational activities are improving observations and climate monitoring, our understanding of climate processes, climate variability and change, and predictions and projections of the future climate. Delivering climate information (including data and knowledge) in a way that is usable and useful for decision-makers has had less attention, and society has yet to optimally benefit from the available information. While weather services routinely help weather-sensitive decision-making, similar services for decisions on longer time scales are less well established. Many organizations are now actively developing climate services, and a growing number of decision-makers are keen to benefit from such services. This article describes progress made over the past decade developing, delivering, and using climate services, in particular from the worldwide effort galvanizing around the Global Framework for Climate Services under the coordination of UN agencies. The article highlights challenges in making further progress and proposes potential new directions to address such challenges.

Regulatory agencies have long adopted a three-tier framework for risk assessment. We build on this structure to propose a tiered approach for resilience assessment that can be integrated into the existing regulatory processes. Comprehensive approaches to assessing resilience at appropriate and operational scales, reconciling analytical complexity as needed with stakeholder needs and resources available, and ultimately creating actionable recommendations to enhance resilience are still lacking. Our proposed framework consists of tiers by which analysts can select resilience assessment and decision support tools to inform associated management actions relative to the scope and urgency of the risk and the capacity of resource managers to improve system resilience. The resilience management framework proposed is not intended to supplant either risk management or the many existing efforts of resilience quantification method development, but instead provide a guide to selecting tools that are appropriate for the given analytic need. The goal of this tiered approach is to intentionally parallel the tiered approach used in regulatory contexts so that resilience assessment might be more easily and quickly integrated into existing structures and with existing policies.

This paper summarizes and synthesizes the research carried out under the NOAA Drought Task Force (DTF) and submitted in this special collection. The DTF is organized and supported by NOAA’s Climate Program Office with the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) and involves scientists from across NOAA, academia, and other agencies. The synthesis includes an assessment of successes and remaining challenges in monitoring and prediction capabilities, as well as a perspective of the current understanding of North American drought and key research gaps. Results from the DTF papers indicate that key successes for drought monitoring include the application of modern land surface hydrological models that can be used for objective drought analysis, including extended retrospective forcing datasets to support hydrologic reanalyses, and the expansion of near-real-time satellite-based monitoring and analyses, particularly those describing vegetation and evapotranspiration. In the area of drought prediction, successes highlighted in the papers include the development of the North American Multimodel Ensemble (NMME) suite of seasonal model forecasts, an established basis for the importance of La Niña in drought events over the southern Great Plains, and an appreciation of the role of internal atmospheric variability related to drought events. Despite such progress, there are still important limitations in our ability to predict various aspects of drought, including onset, duration, severity, and recovery. Critical challenges include (i) the development of objective, science-based integration approaches for merging multiple information sources; (ii) long, consistent hydrometeorological records to better characterize drought; and (iii) extending skillful precipitation forecasts beyond a 1-month lead time.

Integrated water resources management provides an often-recommended governance framework to manage water resources in a sustainable way. The application of this framework on Transboundary Rivers brings additional challenges, which can be exacerbated due to climate changes and extremes (such as droughts). These changes affect the operation of water infrastructures and will affect water management practices. Thus, the understanding and development of adaptation measures (across socio-economic, environmental and administrative systems) are critical, mainly on drought prone transboundary river basins. The paper draws on research conducted to 1) assess climatic risks in those watersheds, 2) describe the challenges in water resources management in the context of climate change, and 3) draw lessons for improving the use of research-based information. Two case studies were selected, the Colorado River Basin (North America) and the Guadiana River (Iberian Peninsula), the latter of which in the context of the five river basins shared between Portugal and Spain. Research and experience in these Basins show that several paradoxes in multistate water management and governance across borders militate against the accurate assessment of socio-economic impacts and the effective use of scientific information for meeting short-term needs in reducing longer-term vulnerabilities. Lessons drawn from both studies, but not always learned in practice, abound. These lessons include an expanded use of incentives for improving collaboration, water-use efficiency, demand management and for the development of climate services to inform water-related management as new threats arise. Recommendations are established for more effectively linking risk assessment approaches with resilience strategies that are applicable in practice and available to decision makers in a changing climate.

There is increasing concern worldwide about the ineffectiveness of current drought management practices that are largely based on crisis management. These practices are reactive and, therefore, only treat the symptoms (impacts) of drought rather than the underlying causes for the vulnerabilities associated with impacts. Through the adoption of national drought policies that are focused on risk reduction and complemented by drought mitigation or preparedness plans at various levels of government, the coping capacity of nations to manage droughts can be improved. The time for adopting an approach that emphasizes drought risk reduction is now, given the spiraling impacts of droughts in an ever-increasing number of sectors and the current and projected trends for the increased frequency, severity and duration of drought events in association with a changing climate. This paper discusses the underlying concepts of drought, the principles and objectives of national drought policies and a drought planning process that has been effective in the preparation of drought mitigation plans.

Drought is among the most damaging, and least understood, of all “natural” hazards. Although some droughts last a single season and affect only small areas, the instrumental and paleoclimate records show that droughts have sometimes continued for decades and have impacted millions of square kilometers in North America, West Africa, and East Asia. To cross the spectrum of potential drivers and impacts, drought information systems have multiple sub-systems which include an integrated risk assessment, communication and decision support system of which early warning is a central component and output. An early warning system is much more than a forecast – it is a linked risk information (including people׳s perception of risk) and communication system that actively engages communities involved in preparedness. There are numerous drought systems warning systems being implemented at different scales of governance. We draw on the lessons of over 21 drought early warning systems around the world, in both developing and developed countries and at regional, national and community levels. The successes illustrate that effective early warning depends upon a multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary collaboration among all concerned actors at each stage in the warning process from monitoring to response and evaluation. However, the links between the community-based approach and the national and global EWSs are relatively weak. Using the rich experience of information systems across the globe, this paper identifies pathways for knowledge management and action at the relevant scales for decision-making in response to a changing climate.

The Caribbean Sea is the second largest sea in the world, covering an area of approximately 2,515,900 kilometers. The region has the largest number of small island developing states (SIDS) and the ...

On the Colorado River (as elsewhere), severe drought is useful for illuminating sources of water supply vulnerability, focusing attention on deficiencies in water allocation and management. A major drought study in the early 1990s, and experience with real drought a decade later, both have been useful in understanding vulnerability as a function of several factors working in consort with drought, including water allocation, reservoir operations, water demands, and climate change. Over this relatively short time-frame, vulnerability has shifted considerably, and will undoubtedly continue to change further in coming decades. Understanding how vulnerability is shifting is central to identifying future management pathways and reform options for the river.

A new field of study, "decadal prediction," is emerging in climate science. Decadal prediction lies between seasonal/interannual forecasting and longer-term climate change projections, and focuses on time-evolving regional climate conditions over the next 10-30 yr. Numerous assessments of climate information user needs have identified this time scale as being important to infrastructure planners, water resource managers, and many others. It is central to the information portfolio required to adapt effectively to and through climatic changes. At least three factors influence time-evolving regional climate at the decadal time scale: 1) climate change commitment (further warming as the coupled climate system comes into adjustment with increases of greenhouse gases that have already occurred), 2) external forcing, particularly from future increases of greenhouse gases and recovery of the ozone hole, and 3) internally generated variability. Some decadal prediction skill has been demonstrated to arise from the first two of these factors, and there is evidence that initialized coupled climate models can capture mechanisms of internally generated decadal climate variations, thus increasing predictive skill globally and particularly regionally. Several methods have been proposed for initializing global coupled climate models for decadal predictions, all of which involve global time-evolving threedimensional ocean data, including temperature and salinity. An experimental framework to address decadal predictability/prediction is described in this paper and has been incorporated into the coordinated Coupled Model Intercomparison Model, phase 5 (CMIP5) experiments, some of which will be assessed for the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5). These experiments will likely guide work in this emerging field over the next 5 yr.

The USCLI VAR working group on drought recently initiated a series of global climate model simulations forced with idealized SST anomaly patterns, designed to address a number of uncertainties regarding the impact of SST forcing and the role of land-atmosphere feedbacks on regional drought. Specific questions that the runs are designed to address include: What are the mechanisms that maintain drought across the seasonal cycle and from one year to the next? What is the role of the leading patterns of SST variability, and what are the physical mechanisms linking the remote SST forcing to regional drought, including the role of land-atmosphere coupling? The runs were carried out with five different atmospheric general circulation models (AGCM5), and one coupled atmosphere-ocean model in which the model was continuously nudged to the imposed SST forcing. This paper provides an overview of the experiments and some initial results focusing on the responses to the leading patterns of annual mean SST variability consisting of a Pacific El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-like pattern, a pattern that resembles the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO), and a global trend pattern. One of the key findings is that all the AGCMs produce broadly similar (though different in detail) precipitation responses to the Pacific forcing pattern, with a cold Pacific leading to reduced precipitation and a warm Pacific leading to enhanced precipitation over most of the United States. While the response to the Atlantic pattern is less robust, there is general agreement among the models that the largest precipitation response over the U.S. tends to occur when the two oceans have anomalies of opposite sign. That is, a cold Pacific and warm Atlantic tend to produce the largest precipitation reductions, whereas a warm Pacific and cold Atlantic tend to produce the greatest precipitation enhancements. Further analysis of the response over the U.S. to the Pacific forcing highlights a number of noteworthy and to some extent unexpected results. These include a seasonal dependence of the precipitation response that is characterized by signal-to-noise ratios that peak in spring, and surface temperature signal-to-noise ratios that are both lower and show less agreement among the models than those found for the precipitation response. Another interesting result concerns what appears to be a substantially different character in the surface temperature response over the U.S. to the Pacific forcing by the only model examined here that was developed for use in numerical weather prediction. The response to the positive SST trend forcing pattern is an overall surface warming over the world's land areas with substantial regional variations that are in part reproduced in runs forced with a globally uniform SST trend forcing. The precipitation response to the trend forcing is weak in all the models.

Present climate of northwestern South America and the southern Isthmus is detailed in terms of major hydro-climatic controls, supported by evidence from station records, reanalysis data and satellite information. In this tropical region, precipitation is the principal hydro-climatological variable to display great variability. The primary objective is to view the controls that operate at intra-seasonal to inter-decadal time scales. This is a topographical complex region whose climate influences range in provenance from the South Atlantic to the Canadian Prairies, and from the North Atlantic to the Eastern Pacific. The situation is further complicated by interactions and feedbacks, in time and space, between these influences, which are interconnected over various scales. The greatest single control on the annual cycle is the meridional migration of the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone and its pattern of associated trade winds. Consideration of these alone and their interaction with the Cordilleras of the Andes and Central America produce a variety of unimodal and bimodal regimes. Regionally, two low level jet streams, the westerly Choco jet (5°N) and the easterly San Andres jet (12–14°N), and their seasonal variability, have tremendous significance, as do mesoscale convective storms and mid-latitude cold fronts from both the northern ( “nortes” ) and southern ( “friagems” ) hemispheres. There are many examples of hydro-climatological feedbacks within the region. Of these the most notable is the interaction between evaporation over the Amazon, precipitation onto the eastern Andes and streamflow from the headwaters of the Amazon. This is further compounded by the high percentages of recycled precipitation over large areas of the tropics and the potential impacts of anthropogenic modification of the land surface. The El Nino-Southern Oscillation phenomenon (ENSO) is the greatest single cause of interannual variability within the region, yet its effects are not universal in their timing, sign or magnitude. A set of regional physical connections to ENSO are established and their varying local manifestations are viewed in the context of the dominant precipitation generating mechanisms and feedbacks at that location. In addition, some potential impacts of longer run variations within the ocean-atmosphere system of the Atlantic are examined independently and in conjunction with ENSO. This review of the climatic controls and feedbacks in the region provides a spatial and temporal framework within which the highly complex set of factors and their interactions may be interpreted from the past.

Having the capacity to monitor droughts in near-real time and providing accurate drought prediction from weeks to seasons in advance can greatly reduce the severity of social and economic damage caused by drought, a leading natural hazard for North America. The congressional mandate to establish the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS; Public Law 109-430) in 2006 was a major impulse to develop, integrate, and provide drought information to meet the challenges posed by this hazard. Significant progress has been made on many fronts. On the research front, efforts by the broad scientific community have resulted in improved understanding of North American droughts and improved monitoring and forecasting tools. We now have a better understanding of the droughts of the twentieth century including the 1930s "Dust Bowl"; we have developed a broader array of tools and datasets that enhance the official North American Drought Monitor based on different methodologies such as state-of-the-art land surface modeling (e.g., the North American Land Data Assimilation System) and remote sensing (e.g., the evaporative stress index) to better characterize the occurrence and severity of drought in its multiple manifestations. In addition, we have new tools for drought prediction [including the new National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System, version 2, for operational prediction and an experimental National Multimodel Ensemble] and have explored diverse methodologies including ensemble hydrologic prediction approaches. Broad NIDIS-inspired progress is influencing the development of a Global Drought Information System (GDIS) under the auspices of the World Climate Research Program. Despite these advances, current drought monitoring and forecasting capabilities still fall short of users' needs, especially the need for skillful and reliable drought forecasts at regional and local scales. To tackle this outstanding challenging problem, focused and coordinated research efforts are needed, drawing from excellence across the broad drought research community. To meet this challenge, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)'s Drought Task Force was established in October 2011 with the ambitious goal of achieving significant new advances in the ability to understand, monitor, and predict drought over North America. The Task Force (duration of October 2011-September 2014) is an initiative of NOAA's Climate Program Office Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) program in partnership with NIDIS. It brings together over 30 leading MAPP-funded drought scientists from multiple academic and federal institutions [involves scientists from NOAA's research laboratories and centers, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and many universities] in a concerted research effort that builds on individual MAPP research projects. These projects span the wide spectrum of drought research needed to make fundamental advances, from those aimed at the basic understanding of drought mechanisms to those aimed at testing new drought monitoring and prediction tools for operational and service purposes (as part of NCEP's Climate Test Bed). The Drought Task Force provides focus and coordination to MAPP drought research activities and also facilitates synergies with other national and international drought research efforts, including those by the GDIS.

Recent extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy and the 2012 drought demonstrate the vulnerability of the United States to climate extremes in the present and point to the potential for increased future damages under a changing climate. They also provide lessons for reducing harm and realizing any potential benefits. Preparedness measures – also referred to as adaptation – can cost-effectively increase resilience today and in the future. The upfront costs will be more than offset by reductions in property damage, lives and livelihoods lost, and expensive post-disaster recovery processes. While others have addressed use of science for adaptation in specific sectors including biodiversity (Heller and Zavaleta, 2009) and freshwater ecosystem management (Wilby et al., 2010), or by simply taking a more pragmatic approach to adaptation under uncertainty (Hallegatte, 2009), here the authors make the case that a new, comprehensive approach is needed to create and use science to inform adaptations with applicable and sound knowledge (Kerr et al., 2011).

Post-catastrophe recovery and financial liquidity have long challenged small Caribbean islands. These states are vulnerable to multifarious natural hazards that often cause considerable socioeconomic dislocation. Such events inflict heavy losses on businesses and households, and significantly disrupt all aspects of government operations. After Hurricane Ivan devastated the economies of some islands in September 2004-with estimated losses of as much as 200 per cent of gross domestic product in some cases-regional governments, aided by the World Bank and international donors, approved the creation of a regional catastrophe insurance scheme. This parametric-based mechanism is underpinned by derivatives-based catastrophe modelling whose outputs determine policy triggers and pay outs. Hazard models, particularly catastrophe models, are not widely accepted as yet. Despite recent advancements, major concerns have rendered them peripheral tools for many establishments. This paper reviews the region's vulnerabilities and examines constraints on the application of these models and suggests a means of improving their efficacy and acceptability.

Recent and historical events illustrate the vulnerabilities of the U.S. west to extremes in precipitation that result from a range of meteorological phenomena. This vision provides an approach to mitigating impacts of such weather and water extremes that is tailored to the unique meteorological conditions and user needs of the Western U.S. in the 21st Century. It includes observations for tracking, predicting, and managing the occurrence and impacts of major storms and is informed by a range of user-requirements, workshops, scientific advances, and technological demonstrations. The vision recommends innovations and enhancements to existing monitoring networks for rain, snow, snowmelt, flood, and their hydrometeorological precursor conditions, including radars to monitor winds aloft and precipitation, soil moisture sensors, stream gages, and SNOTEL enhancements, as well as entirely new observational tools. Key limitations include monitoring the fuel for heavy precipitation, storms over the eastern Pacific, precipitation distributions, and snow and soil moisture conditions. This article presents motivation and context, and describes key components, an implementation strategy, and expected benefits. This document supports a Resolution of the Western States Water Council for addressing extreme events.

Weather and climatic extremes can have serious and damaging effects on human society and infrastructure as well as on ecosystems and wildlife. Thus, they are usually the main focus of attention of the news media in reports on climate. There are some indications from observations concerning how climatic extremes may have changed in the past. Climate models show how they could change in the future either due to natural climate fluctuations or under conditions of greenhouse gas-induced warming. These observed and modeled changes relate directly to the understanding of socioeconomic and ecological impacts related to extremes.

Societal impacts from weather and climate extremes, and trends in those impacts, are a function of both climate and society. United States losses resulting from weather extremes have grown steadily with time. Insured property losses have trebled since 1960, but deaths from extremes have not grown except for those due to floods and heat waves. Data on losses are difficult to find and must be carefully adjusted before meaningful assessments can be made. Adjustments to historical loss data assembled since the late 1940s shows that most of the upward trends found in financial losses are due to societal shifts leading to ever—growing vulnerability to weather and climate extremes. Geographical locations of the large loss trends establish that population growth and demographic shifts are the major factors behind the increasing losses from weather—climate extremes. Most weather and climate extremes in the United States do not exhibit steady, multidecadal increases found in their loss values. Without majo...

Daily station data from U.S. Department of Agriculture snowpack telemetry (SNOTEL) archives through the 1995/1996 season are used to examine the climatic characteristics of snow water equivalent (SWE) for the mountainous western United States and linkages with precipitation (PRE) and temperature. Quality control procedures were developed to screen outliers in each variable. SWE for April 1 at the SNOTEL sites compares favorably with colocated snow course values. Regional differences in the seasonal cycle of SWE are discussed in terms of winter-half precipitation, temperature, and the corresponding SWE/PRE ratio. The percentage of annual precipitation represented by snowfall is highest for the Sierra Nevada (67%), northwestern Wyoming (64%), Colorado (63%), and Idaho/western Montana (62%) sectors, manifesting high SWE/PRE ratios and winter-half precipitation maxima. Lower percentages for the Pacific Northwest (50%) and Arizona/New Mexico (39%) reflect lower ratios and, especially for the latter region, a larger fraction of PRE falling outside of the accumulation season. Interannual variability in SWE in the colder inland regions is primarily controlled by available precipitation. For the warmer Pacific coast regions and Arizona/New Mexico the more important factor is the SWE/PRE ratio, illustrating the sensitivity of these areas to climate change. The bulk of western United States surface water resources, represented by the flow of the Colorado and Columbia river systems, is derived from melt of the winter snowpack. In terms of flow volume the Columbia River system is the fourth largest in the United States (averaging 167.7 x 10  m), with half the annual flow stored for flood control, hydropower, and irriga- tion. By contrast, the Colorado River annual flow is about 17.2 x 10  mwith up to 4 times the annual flow in storage. Annual water consumption in the west averages 44% of re- newable supplies compared with 4% in the rest of the country (el-Ashry and Gibbons, 1988). The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has indicated that during a dry period such as occurred from 1931 to 1940, the water needs of the lower Colorado River Basin would not be met (el-Ashry and Gibbons, 1988). In the Colorado River Basin and southern California, groundwater is being mined and water supplies are being imported from ad- joining states. Trade-offs among urban, agricultural, and envi- ronmental water needs have increased electricity transfers be- tween the northwest and southwest regions during their respective peak and low periods (Pulwany and Redmond, 1997). Hence management of western water resources into the next century and beyond presents a formidable challenge.

(1999). Reframing disaster policy: the global evolution of vulnerable communities. Global Environmental Change Part B: Environmental Hazards: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 39-44.

The Pacific Northwest is dependent on the vast and complex Columbia River system for power production, irrigation, navigation, flood control, recreation, municipal and industrial water supplies, and fish and wildlife habitat. In recent years Pacific salmon populations in this region, a highly valued cultural and economic resource, have declined precipitously. Since 1980, regional entities have embarked on the largest effort at ecosystem management undertaken to date in the United States, primarily aimed at balancing hydropower demands with salmon restoration activities. It has become increasingly clear that climatically driven fluctuations in the freshwater and marine environments occupied by these fish are an important influence on population variability. It is also clear that there are significant prospects of climate predictability that may prove advantageous in managing the water resources shared by the long cast of regional interests. The main thrusts of this study are 1) to describe the cli...

Disasters are most acutely experienced at the local level (high agreement, robust evidence). The reality of disasters in terms of loss of life and property occurs in local places and to local people. These localized impacts can then cascade to have national and international consequences. In this chapter, local refers to a range of places, social groupings, experience, management, institutions, conditions, and sets of knowledge that exist at a sub-national scale. [5.1] Developing strategies for disaster risk management in the context of climate change requires a range of approaches, informed by and customized to specific local circumstances (high agreement, robust evidence). These differences and the context (national to global, urban to rural) in which they are situated shape local vulnerability and local impacts. [5.1] The impacts of climate extremes and weather events may threaten human security at the local level (high agreement, medium evidence). Vulnerability at the local level is attributed to social, political, and economic conditions and drivers including localized environmental degradation and climate change. Addressing disaster risk and climate extremes at the local level requires attention to much wider issues relating to sustainable development. [5.1] While structural measures provide some protection from disasters, they may also create a false sense of safety (high agreement, robust evidence). Such measures result in increased property development, heightened population density, and more disaster exposure. Current regulations and design levels for structural measures may be inadequate under conditions of climate change.

In this context, the overall purpose of this review is to bring attention to the opportunities that five countries in the region - Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka - have to strengthen and expand interventions to improve the reproductive health of poor women. The specific objectives are: i) to provide an accurate picture of the current status of women's reproductive health, describe the use of reproductive health services and barriers to use, and identify the improvements required to increase their effectiveness and improve health outcomes; ii) to elucidate individual and household characteristics that affect reproductive health status and use of services so that the most important of these can be used to identify women and households with the greatest need for care to achieve better health; iii) to describe a simple and effective approach - decentralized action planning - that can be used widely in all five countries to improve reproductive health service delivery and outcomes, and point to a body of best practices in reproductive health that provides models and lessons for improvements in South Asia; and iv) to strengthen the case for investing in poor women's reproductive health by demonstrating the links between poverty, inequality, reproductive health care and expenditure.

Many climate change adaptation efforts aim to address the implications of potential changes in the frequency, intensity, and duration of weather and climate events that affect the risk of extreme impacts on human society. That risk is determined not only by the climate and weather events (the hazards) but also by the exposure and vulnerability to these hazards. Therefore, effective adaptation and disaster risk management strategies and practices also depend on a rigorous understanding of the dimensions of exposure and vulnerability, as well as a proper assessment of changes in those dimensions. This chapter aims to provide that understanding and assessment, by further detailing the determinants of risk as presented in Chapter 1. The first sections of this chapter elucidate the concepts that are needed to define and understand risk, and show that risk originates from a combination of social processes and their interaction with the environment (Sections 2.2 and 2.3), and highlight the role of coping and adaptive capacities (Section 2.4). The following section (2.5) describes the different dimensions of vulnerability and exposure as well as trends therein. Given that exposure and vulnerability are highly context-specific, this section is by definition limited to a general overview (a more quantitative perspective on trends is provided in Chapter 4). A methodological discussion (Section 2.6) of approaches to identify and assess risk provides indications of how the dimensions of exposure and vulnerability can be explored in specific contexts, such as adaptation planning, and the central role of risk perception and risk communication. The chapter concludes with a cross-cutting discussion of risk accumulation and the nature of disasters.

Presents a collection of slides covering the following topics: National Integrated Drought Information System; regional early warning system; UCRB Weekly Drought Assessment; remote sensing; Apalachicola-Ghattahoochee-Flint River Basin; drought risk planning.