ABSTRACT
The risk of natural hazards depends on society’s vulnerability. Recent literature addresses the destructive force of drought for a variety of systems and for multifaceted impacts (Kossida et al. 2012; EEA 2013) as symptoms of vulnerability. To analyse these vulnerabilities, commonly studies focused on certain regions and thematic sectors (e.g. developing countries, agriculture) (Easterling & Mendelsohn 2000; Stone & Potgieter 2008; Wilhelmi & Wilhite 2002), whereas only few aim to look at multiple facets of drought as a hazard (Aggett 2012; Karavitis et al. 2014). Most approaches construct vulnerability indices from subjectively weighted combinations of relevant vulnerability factors (Jordaan 2012; Kumar 2008). Considerably less research has been dedicated to the analysis of differences in vulnerabilities for different sectors and regions (Aggett 2012; Blauhut, in review) and only few investigations considered past reported drought impacts to verify or directly link their vulnerability indices to documented consequences of drought (Naumann et al. 2013; Karavitis et al. 2014). Besides these differences all approaches have one common characteristic; all treat vulnerability as static, i.e. most vulnerability indices are characterized for the conditions at a particular time. Thus there is a need for a better understanding of its dynamics. This analysis defines drought vulnerability by its impacts and an ex-ante-, inter-and ex-post analysis of impacts for selected European drought events is used to detect potential drivers of vulnerability change on a large scale.
