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Towards a greater awareness for drought mitigation in China

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Abstract

Drought awareness promotes people to be more sensitive to water shortage and more likely to support water-saving policies. Studying the spatiotemporal patterns and determinants of drought awareness is necessary for developing drought-resistant measures that can adapt to regional social responses. This paper employs the Baidu Index and sc-PDSI, in conjunction with the Principal Component Analysis, to explore the spatiotemporal patterns and influencing factors of drought awareness in China. The results indicate that the first two principal component modes can explain 75% of the total variance of drought awareness in China. The drought awareness of the people is more sensitive to summer droughts and less to winter droughts. The population and education level are the two most important influencing factors at the current stage. It is found that people are most concerned about the drought in Northeast China, while people in central and eastern China are concerned about the drought events in local and other regions. The responses of drought awareness to actual meteorological drought events can be synchronous or asynchronous for different regions. The results demonstrate the usability of big data in drought awareness research and provide crucial insights for the formulation of drought mitigation policies in China.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51621061, 51679233), and the Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (B14002). The data supporting our analyses can be accessed publicly from the link provided in the paper, and the simulation data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request. The authors thank the reviewers for their constructive comments and useful suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Funding

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Agricultural Water Research in China, China Agricultural University, Beijing, 100083, China

    Zhen Weng, Jun Niu & Taisheng Du

  2. National Field Scientific Observation and Research Station On Oasis Agro-ecosystem in Wuwei of Gansu Province, Ministry of Science and Technology, Wuwei, 733000, China

    Zhen Weng, Jun Niu & Taisheng Du

  3. Bureau of Hydrology and Water Resources, Pearl River Water Resources Commission, Ministry of Water Resources, Guangzhou, 510610, China

    Wenming Zhang

  4. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai, 400076, India

    Bellie Sivakumar

  5. Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, China

    Ji Chen

Authors
  1. Zhen Weng
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  2. Jun Niu
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  3. Wenming Zhang
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  4. Bellie Sivakumar
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  5. Ji Chen
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  6. Taisheng Du
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Contributions

Conceptualization: JN; Methodology: ZW; Formal analysis and investigation: ZW, WZ; Writing—original draft preparation: ZW; Writing—review and editing: JN, BS, JC; Funding acquisition: JN, TD; Resources: ZW, JN; Supervision: JN.

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Correspondence to Jun Niu.

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Appendix A

Appendix A

See Fig. 15 and Table 2.

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Weng, Z., Niu, J., Zhang, W. et al. Towards a greater awareness for drought mitigation in China. Stoch Environ Res Risk Assess 36, 1669–1687 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00477-021-02086-x

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