Environmental Footprints of Drought: Focusing on Emerging Issues and Their Underlying Mechanisms

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, human activities, along with climatic variabilities, have adversely impacted socioeconomic and environmental conditions, leading to a growing drought susceptibility mainly in arid and semiarid parts of the world. Droughts are associated with the dynamic nature of human–environment interactions in ecosystems at different scales and dimensions, resulting in a wide range of issues such as soil and air quality deterioration, vegetation degradation, water scarcity, human migration, urban water supply issues, a reduction in hydropower production, etc., and so concerted efforts are required to bring all emergent concerns and their related processes together into a unified framework to serve as a roadmap for research and management. This Special Issue plans to attempt to offer a closer look into the dynamic nature of the natural and anthropogenic factors in generating compound droughts (hydro-meteorological, agricultural, and socioeconomic), with the ultimate goal of understanding the climate system's vulnerability, underlying effects of droughts, exposure, and sensitivity of the system, which could be used to kick-start the adaptation planning processes and reduce the drought risk in the 21st century. Scientists/researchers are encouraged to introduce ideas and concepts related to droughts, their classifications, assessment, relationships with large-scale climate patterns, and complex land–atmosphere feedback mechanisms by incorporating various data sources such as observations or modeling studies, targeted field campaigns, or long-term measurements ranging from local to regional spatial scales.

Dr. Jinping Liu
Dr. Quoc Bao Pham
Dr. Arfan Arshad
Dr. Masoud Jafari Shalamzari
Guest Editors

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