Drought, Risk Management, and Policy: Lessons from the drought science-policy interface

Scientists and policy makers in Australia and the United States face very similar challenges in the management of drought risk. Compared with other drought-affected countries, both have the relative luxury that drought is not accompanied by famine and is rarely a matter of life and death. Both nations seek to manage drought risk from within federal structures, which come with their own political, bureaucratic, and constitutional challenges. And both struggle with the difficulty, common to many liberal democracies, of managing the science/policy/citizen interface. This collection has sought to explore the issues that face both policy makers and scientists, including social scientists, associated with the uncertainty that drought, and in the longer-term climate change, bring to human activities that depend on water. We have brought together scientific experts, policy advisers, and contributors who have operated at the interface between science and policy in an attempt to unpack the complexities of developing societal responses to drought that are sustainable environmentally, socially, and economically. We believe that the mix of backgrounds and experience of our contributors provides a particularly rich perspective on these issues as it combines the findings of the theoretically informed research-based scholarly literature with the realities of the practitioner on the ground who seeks to influence and improve community capacity to deal with the phenomenon of drought.