Sept. 20, 2006 — Like death and taxes, droughts in the United States are a certainty, so why not plan for them? That’s what researchers are arguing at a special drought conference this week in Longmont, Colo.
Among the ways unexpected stretches of dry weather can be survived are to develop a national drought policy, as well as learn to store water underground — where it won’t evaporate as it can in a reservoir.
Such a policy would be a entirely new paradigm for the United States, where droughts are currently handled as emergencies and dealt with after they have struck. It was the same in Australia before they instituted a national drought policy in 1989.
"Australia went through the paradigm shift in the late 1980s," said political scientist and drought policy researcher Linda Botterill of Australian National University in Canberra. "Drought was no longer considered a disaster."
The idea, she explained, is to manage droughts like any other risk — in other words, expect them to happen and minimize any related losses.
Australia’s drought policy was a logical step for a nation with one of the most variable climates in the world, said Botterill. It’s also a good fit for the United States — which almost always has a significant drought under way somewhere, every year.
In fact, the United States can probably learn a thing or two from the Australian experience, said climatologist and drought policy specialist Donald Wilhite of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln.
