Today marks the end of the very first multi-day international drought symposium at VUB, featuring speakers and scientists from all continents, including a strong Palestinian and Jordanian delegation. The symposium approached drought from various disciplines and was co-organized by VUB doctoral student Estifanos Addisu Yimer, who noticed the absence of such a symposium elsewhere. However, drought is an age-old issue that will only become more pressing with climate change.
The symposium primarily focused on the complexity of drought and the need for tailored policies to engage people worldwide in the issue and provide appropriate infrastructure to address future droughts.
"The emphasis is on nature-based solutions," says co-organizer and VUB professor of Hydrology, Ann van Griensven. "This means we want to utilize nature to better regulate local water management. It could involve reopening old river channels with their meanders, which have often been straightened in the past for the benefit of navigation. It could also include the implementation of systems to control land drainage or the restoration of wetlands. These aspects are also relevant in Flanders, where the main concern is a shortage of capacity to store rainwater."
In past centuries, the latter aspects were often filled in, primarily for sanitary reasons such as combating malaria or reclaiming new agricultural land from nature. "We can rely less and less on existing hydrological models to predict the future," adds van Griensven. "Traditionally, drought was considered as a deviation of around ten percent from the normal situation. Due to climate change, this margin is increasing, resulting in more severe and prolonged deviations on the dry side of normality and more frequent and intense floods on the other side. Moreover, not all droughts are linked to heat, as we are experiencing now. It can also occur in winter when there is prolonged dryness, leading to insufficient groundwater or surface water reserves in summer. In all these cases, and almost everywhere in the world, it is the most vulnerable population that is hardest hit."