A new perspective on socioeconomic drought: a distributed and standardized index

Abstract

In drought studies, a standardized index has better applicability, and a distributed index can improve our ability to identify the spatial aspects of droughts. However, for socioeconomic drought, none of the existing indices is both spatially distributed and standardized. To fill this gap, this study proposes a novel index, Distributed Standardized SocioEconomic Drought Index (DSSEDI), to accurately identify socioeconomic drought over time and space. Moreover, a high-precision, long-term gridded water demand dataset is developed as the basis of establishing this index. For the East River basin, DSSEDI accurately detected significant socioeconomic droughts in 2002, 2004–2005, 2009, and 2011, mostly during autumn-winter-spring. The Pearl River Delta was found to have significant population and economic vulnerability to droughts, with economic exposure peaking at $4.66 billion near Shenzhen during severe events. As a standardized index, it can be adaptable to other regions. Overall, this study provides a new perspective on socioeconomic drought by increasing spatial resolution of water demand data and accounting for the impacts of water conservation measures on observations during the establishment process of DSSEDI.