Understanding Your Risk and Impacts

 Ranking Drought Impacts

Drought can result in many direct and indirect impacts. Some of these may be more important than others in terms of your values and interests. Addressing the most significant impacts first will help target limited resources and hopefully have a larger effect in reducing drought impacts.
Creating a checklist of potential drought impacts will help determine the broad range of possible effects, which can then be ranked.

Developing a Drought Impact Ranking Matrix at the State/Community Level

At the state level, for example, rankings should take into consideration concerns such as cost, areal extent, trends over time, public opinion, fairness, and the ability of the affected area to recover. To assist in this ranking and ensure equitable policy formulation, the general public, community advisory committees, and groups of relevant scientists and policy makers should be included in the process. It may be useful to develop some kind of table, as show below, to help organize the information used in your decision making.

Developing a Drought Impact Ranking Matrix at the Business/Individual Scale

A similar process can also be undertaken at the individual or business level. Each person or business may be affected differently by drought. Therefore, identifying the relevant critical impacts is essential for making informed management decisions.

From this list of prioritized impacts, a person should also decide how many of the high priority impacts to address. Once this is done, the next step is to understand the underlying causes of the drought impacts. Then planners can begin the process of identifying and implementing appropriate drought mitigation actions.