Mind the gap: misalignment between drought monitoring and community realities

Despite recent studies emphasising the dual human and physical nature of droughts, there is a lag in advancing this insight in drought monitoring and early warning systems (DEWSs). These systems mainly depend on hydro-climatic indices and often overlook the experiences of affected communities, resulting in a drought monitoring gap. This study introduces the monitoring efficacy matrix (MEM) to assess the alignment between officially monitored data, relevant to drought impacts, and the actual experiences of a rural community in northeastern Brazil, which we investigated through interviews. The MEM revealed “drought monitoring challenges”, composed of mismatches and blind spots between the official data and local experiences. Mismatches stem from varying spatial and temporal levels; blind spots arise from the diversity of local resilience strategies, or vulnerabilities, influencing drought impacts. What we define as a “drought monitoring gap” results from the tendency to prioritise specific indices and pragmatic spatial and temporal levels over a comprehensive drought monitoring approach. We posit that a first step to bridging this gap can draw inspiration from recent drought-impact-monitoring initiatives, which are focused on the continuous monitoring of non-extreme events by municipal technical extension officers. However, ultimately bridging the drought monitoring gap remains conditional on the adaptation of DEWS frameworks to accommodate the integration of qualitative and local data representing the relevant drought-related local context.