Impact Assessments

State agencies, non-governmental organizations and others may conduct post-drought assessments to better understand how drought affected agriculture, health, food security, energy, communities and other areas of interest, and to document responses and outcomes. These assessments are extremely valuable for learning from one drought to the next, but they can be hard to find if you don’t know that they are there. This archive is intended to become a permanent repository for post-drought assessments. To recommend additional resources for this list, please email ndmc@unl.edu.

State-level

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Alabama

• Legislative response to drought, 1955: Alabama’s Water Resources, A Plan for the Creation of a Temporary Commission to Study the State’s Water Resources and to Develop a Water Policy for the State

California

• Public Policy Institute of California, August 2015: What if California's Drought Continues?
• California Legislative Analyst’s Office, February 2016: The State’s Drought Response
• University of California-Davis, August 2015: Economic Analysis of the 2015 Drought for California Agriculture
• Pacific Institute, February 2016: Impacts of California’s Ongoing Drought: Hydro-electricity Generation 2015 Update
• California Natural Resources Agency, 2021: Report to the legislature on the 2012-2016 drought
• The Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) maintains a regular focus on drought, including many assessments of impacts and related solutions.
• UC Davis and the PPIC also provide ongoing assessment: Impacts of the Drought to California Agriculture

Florida

• Florida Geological Survey, 1962: The Drought of 1954-64, Its Effect on Florida’s Surface-Water Resources

Georgia

• Water Use and Conservation Committee, 1955: A Report on the Historical, Physical, and Legal Aspects of Water in Georgia
• State Division of Conservation, 1955: Surface Water Resources of Georgia During the Drought of 1954

Missouri

• Missouri Department of Natural Resources, 2019: Missouri 2018 Drought Response Final Report

Oklahoma

• Shideler et al.: The Economic Impact of the 2011 Drought
• Gateway to Oklahoma History: Oklahoma Soil Conservation Service photos

Texas

• Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, February 2012: The Impact of the 2011 Drought and Beyond
• Anderson, Welch and Robinson, 2012: Agricultural Impacts of Texas’s Driest Year on Record
• Scanlon, Duncan and Reedy, 2013: Drought and the Water-Energy Nexus in Texas

Washington

• Washington State Department of Ecology, 2017: 2015 Drought and Agriculture

Regional

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• National Drought Mitigation Center, 2013: From Too Much to Too Little: How the central U.S. drought of 2012 evolved out of one of the most devastating floods on record in 2011 | Executive Summary
• Western States Water Council, August 2013: Measuring, Quantifying and Reporting Drought Impacts
• National Drought Mitigation Center: The Dust Bowl
• National Integrated Drought Information System, 2019: Flash Drought: Lessons Learned from the 2017 Drought Across the U.S. Northern Plains and Canadian Prairies (full report)
• Hoell, A., and Coauthors, Lessons Learned from the 2017 Flash Drought Across the U.S. Northern Great Plains and Canadian Prairies. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., doi: https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0272.1.
• Office of the Washington State Climatologist, UW Climate Impacts Group, Oregon State Climatologist, Idaho Department of Water Resources, 2021: 2020 Pacific Northwest Water Year Impacts Assessment
• Konrad, C., and P. Knox, 2016: The Southeastern Drought and Wildfires of 2016
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sept. 2022: Drought Impacts on Hydroelectric power Generation in the Western United States

National

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• USDA Economic Research Service: U.S. Drought 2012: Farm and Food Impacts
• Roger Pulwarty Congressional Testimony April 2013: Drought and the Effect on Energy and Water Management Decisions
• National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center: Billion-Dollar Disasters
• U.S. Department of Agriculture Southwest Climate Hub, interactive map of indemnified losses by county, year and cause of loss, including drought: AgRisk Viewer
• Library of Congress historic photos, including from the Dust Bowl

Continental

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• The European Drought Centre hosts the European Drought Impact Report Inventory (EDII) to disseminate information about past European drought impacts.

Global

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• The World Meteorological Organization’s Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970-2019) attributed 650,000 deaths to drought during those years, mostly in developing countries.

 

To recommend additional resources for this list, please email ndmc@unl.edu.