Abstract

۱ Introduction

۲ Data and methods

۳ Characteristics of national drought awareness

۴ Discussion

۵ Conclusions

Appendix A

References

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.

Introduction

     Drought is one of the most serious natural disasters, as it causes enormous economic and social losses every year due to its complex evolutionary mechanisms. Numerous studies have attempted to assess or predict the evolution and severity of droughts using hydrological models and climate data (Zhang et al., 2011,2017b; Niu et al., 2015; Ma et al., 2016; Sun et al., 2019; Valiya Veettil and Mishra 2020; Xing et al., 2020). Such studies have been able to understand the spatiotemporal dynamics of droughts and provide reasonably good predictions of droughts, thus allowing early warnings. However, tens of millions of people and livestock still suffer from the lack of water availability during drought periods, and droughts continue to cost huge economic losses. This situation may be due to the fact that drought research and relief policies are not sufficiently adapted to bring awareness to individuals on droughts, and so drought mitigation strategies cannot be effectively put into practice (Switzer and Vedlitz, 2017). Drought awareness can reflect the public concern on perception about water shortage and support for water-saving policies. A better understanding of drought awareness will promote drought monitoring and prediction and make drought relief measures to play a better social role. Thus, it is necessary to explore the determinants and effects of the public’s drought awareness.

Conclusions

     This study used the Baidu index search data to quantify drought awareness in China. The spatiotemporal patterns of drought awareness were investigated, including the distribution characteristics of the correlations between the drought awareness and meteorological drought in space or time, the effect of drought severity, and socioeconomic factors on drought awareness. The major findings from this study are as follows.

    Drought awareness in China is sensitive to summer droughts, and people generally pay less attention to drought in winter.

     People in the eastern or central regions (e.g., Fujian, Hebei, Zhejiang, and Hubei) pay attention to the droughts not only in their own regions, but also in others (especially in Northeast China). Therefore, one can start from the eastern and central regions to publicize the drought relief plans and take the northeast as a pilot to implement anti-drought or drought mitigation measures, which can quickly make the whole country be aware of and understand the drought relief work.