Drought management

Intelligent decisions when every drop of water counts

Currently about 2.3 billion people globally are regularly impacted by water stress and droughts. By 2050, about 75% of the world’s population will experience the effects of water shortages. In July 2022, dry weather left more than half of Europe exposed to either warning or alert drought levels. Water and heat stresses are driving crop yields down, reducing energy production and threatening water supply.

Key challenges

Every day, strategical, tactical and operational water managements decisions are being made to optimally use every drop of water and to minimize the social, environmental and economic impact of droughts. In order to make these decisions, access to historical, current and forecasted information is required to:

• Deepen understanding: when and where will the water demand be highest and how does that compare with short to long-term availability?
• Enable cooperation: water resources are often shared across borders and catchment boundaries, transparent and equitable use of water for all stakeholders is critical.
• Be accountable: demonstrating compliance in an auditable and robust way reduces the burden on regulators to police water use, allowing them to focus on improvements.
• Improve asset management: understanding how and when to operate assets that control water is vital. We must reduce waste of precious water resource and ensure that systems are optimised to improve our resilience to droughts.
• Identify and address key issues: systems need to be adaptable and able to capture emerging issues like PFAS or salination of groundwater and surface water.

HydroNET drought management solutions:

• Are highly personalised, allowing you to build context with your data and supporting you in making faster, smarter decisions.
• Help water resource managers to better understand current and forecasted water demand and availability.
• Provide alerts, warnings and trigger actions so that as risks emerge, you’re ready to make the right decisions and take action faster.
• Unlock data boundaries, allowing users to connect rainfall, temperature, actual and potential evaporation, soil moisture, groundwater levels, dam volumes, and river flows to provide an incredibly adaptable picture of your water resources.
• Demonstrate compliance for abstraction licenses, improving transparency and providing an auditable account of water use against agreed limits.
• Support cooperation across boundaries and organisations in responding to droughts and directing support where it is needed most.
• Can link to satellite based-drought indicators and add these seamlessly to your analysis of drought risk.
• Can help users make informed decisions on irrigated water use.

Impact numbers drought management