Co-designing Strategies to Manage Drought-related Risks in Southern South America
SISSA is currently providing climate services to assist La Plata Basin governments, institutions and civil society with reducing the economic, social and environmental impacts of drought.
Carolina Vera1,2,3, María de los Milagros Skansi1,4, Cecilia Hidalgo1,2
Increasingly frequent and long droughts affect southern South America. Millions of people in Argentina, Plurinational State of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay are employed in drought sensitive sectors that are continuously under threat. The worst affected are the agriculture, hydroelectrical energy and river transportation sectors. In 2019, the Regional Climate Centre for Southern South America (CRC-SAS) organized participatory activities to address the management of drought-related risks, which led to the launch of the Drought Information System for Southern South America (SISSA). SISSA implementation on-the-ground has been responsive to national contexts and needs and been inclusive of all actors in drought management, as well as the many stakeholders, to design tailored drought services. SISSA is currently providing climate services to assist La Plata Basin governments, institutions and civil society with reducing the economic, social and environmental impacts of drought.
The Andes, which stretches across Chile and Argentina around 30° South latitude, has been experiencing a so-called megadrought since 2010 with dire impacts on water resources and vegetation and increasingly frequent wildfires. In 2018, the megadrought became the longest sequence of dry years since observations began in the region in 1914. Paleoclimatic reconstructions show that there has been almost no analogous situation in the last millennium. Thus, the drought situation in southern South America was already dire in 2019 when the CRC-SAS brought actors from meteorological and hydrological services, local institutions and decision-makers together to prioritize the development of strategies to manage drought-related risk. With implementation funding from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Euroclima + program of the European Union, they established SISSA to provide climate services that would allow governments, institutions and civil society in the region to prepare for, and mitigate, drought associated economic, social and environmental risks. SISSA drought-related climate service aim to improve (i) regional institutional capacities, (ii) planning and preparedness and (iii) risk management governance.
The SISSA drought monitoring and prediction platform was developed in coordination with the region’s six meteorological services as well as with universities and other scientific-technological institutions. The platform’s meteorological database integrates quality-controlled and (mostly) daily-updated data from the six countries, which is complemented by satellite data. The SISSA platform routinely produces a wide variety of diagnostic products on drought conditions in a consistent and automated manner for the entire region as well as 15-day forecasts of drought conditions, and multi-model seasonal predictions of rainfall and temperature thresholds that are relevant for drought conditions. SISSA provides easy access to raw and derived data through an application programming interface (API). The products have been tailored to the diverse needs of decisionmakers through various co-design activities. The SISSA monitoring and prediction working group continuously evaluates the performance of the platform and identifies new strategies to strengthen drought monitoring and prediction strategies at the regional level as well as at the national and subnational level.
Demonstration projects
The La Plata Basin experienced a partially La Niña provoked multi-year drought between 2019 and 2023 that permitted SISSA to undertake demonstration projects in real-life situations. The Basin encompasses northern Argentina, southeastern Bolivia, southern Brazil, Paraguay and most of Uruguay – a population well over 200 million. The drought seriously affected the availability of fresh water for domestic use, for socioeconomic activities and for natural ecosystems (such as the Pantanal). There were disruptions in the water supply, forest fires, reduced agricultural yields, decreased river transportation and a significant reduction in hydroelectric energy production.
The SISSA demonstration projects aimed to contribute to solving specific problems in drought sensitive sectors to show the added value of drought information in decision-making on related risks. The implementation of the demonstration projects was based on the methodology of co-design and co-production of knowledge. A team of interdisciplinary experts worked together with actors in each of the targeted sectors to (1) make a preliminary mapping of decisions, (2) identify information needs, (3) select or adapt drought products relevant to the needs of the sector, (4) co-design and implement a drought climate service adjusted to the needs of the sector, and (5) iteratively evaluate and redesign of the climate service prior to operational implementation.
The implementation of the SISSA demonstration projects was carried out for three drought sensitive sectors: agriculture, hydropower production and river transportation. Agriculture is the socioeconomic kingpin of the region with a value chain that links a wide network of public and private actors. The agriculture project was implemented in Argentina and focused on co-designing new monitoring and prediction tools for soil water content and the consolidation and expansion of local climate information. The hydropower project was implemented in Brazil in order to develop and implement hydrological prediction models at different timescales – the country gets 60% of its energy from hydroelectricity. The river transportation project on navigation along the Paraguay and Paraná rivers (known as the “Hidrovia” or waterway) focused on developing monthly and seasonal depth prediction tools for critical passages in the waterway. The two rivers provide the landlocked countries of Paraguay and Bolivia with access to the sea and are a main route for transporting grain, especially for Argentina’s “Gran Rosario” area which processes and exports soybean to the world.
National drought plans
SISSA further proposed collaborative technical-political dialogue for the development of national drought plans, including preparation and response policies, in order to strengthen the governance of drought risk management in the region. To adapt to the circumstances in each country, SISSA carried out an initial assessment to evaluate drought impacts in each country, the need for a national drought plan and the state of progress in drought management at the national level. The assessment highlighted both strength and weaknesses:
- All of the six countries had drought-related institutions with formal organizational structures and assigned responsibilities
- One country had scientific-technical institutions with qualified personnel and sufficient funding for drought-related risk evaluation while the other countries fell short of the mark or had no such institutions
- In most countries, civil society and the private sector had at least partial multisector
collaboration, including public-private relationships - The majority of country could at least partially deploy timely proactive territorial actions and had the required legal, budgetary and human resources at the different levels of government
- None of the countries had a ratified national drought plan that was being implemented.
Work is now being carried out to develop national drought-related risk management action plans within the SISSA framework in collaboration with national agencies. The plan for Argentina is the most advanced, while the others are in the initial stage. The collaborations include participatory activities (inter-institutional workshops, interviews, surveys, etc.) with stakeholders and institutions to co-design the action plan. One of the pillars of the action plans is the consolidation of monitoring and early warnings systems, including the work of national drought monitoring groups. Another pillar focuses on the evaluation of vulnerabilities and risks of drought, which is coordinated with the activities of the National Climate Change Cabinet. A third pillars identifies measures to reduce the impact of droughts and improve response in combination with national action for adaptation to climate change. This third pillar offers practical means for determining the criteria, guides, protocols and instruments necessary for the implementation of the plan at the national, provincial and local levels.
More to come
SISSA is the first CRC-SAS initiative focused on supporting risk management actions for a specific climate hazard. The co-design and co-production of knowledge has been successful in strengthening drought monitoring and forecasting service capacities of the region’s National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs). The three demonstration projects have yielded best practices and lessons learned that will inform future replication and expansion projects. Argentina’s national drought plan is already showing promising results and has become a valuable success story, inspiring similar collaborative efforts in the rest of the region.
Based on the success and lessons learned in the implementation of SISSA, the CRC-SAS has developed a proposal for the implementation of an Information System for Forest Fire Risk Management in southern South America (SIGRIFSA), which will be financed by the IDB for implementation starting in the second half of 2024.
More information available at https://sissa.crc-sas.org/
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Footnotes
1 Coordination Team, Drought Information System for Southern South America (SISSA)
2 University of Buenos Aires, Argentina
3 National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina
4 National Weather Service of Argentina