Sustainability, Vol. 12, Pages 2687: A General Overview of the Risk-Reduction Strategies for Floods and Droughts (Sustainability)

Water is a limited resource but essential to sustaining life and supporting economic development. Only 2.5% of all the water on Earth is freshwater and can be used to meet basic human needs such as a clean supply of water for drinking, cooking, and bathing. Water scarcity is the result of an imbalance between supply and demand. Efficient water resource management is definitely of interest to research and is a practical topic. At the same time, water-related disasters such as floods and droughts cause the loss of life and property. Disasters increase the difficulty of effective water resource management. An increase in climate extremes can also increase the risk of floods and droughts. This overview covers 150 peer-reviewed journal publications from the last twenty years focusing on risk-reduction strategies for floods and droughts. First, a definition and classification of flood and drought was introduced. Second, studies and techniques associated with risk reduction were grouped into three themes and discussed: prediction and warning; monitoring; and impact assessment, response, and management. As a result, many studies were solely focused on, and achieve excellence in, their own themes. Special attention was needed to find in these studies what can convert the adverse impacts such as flood water to positive outcomes such as drought relief. Multidisciplinary cooperation is necessary to achieve sustainability and to adapt to climate change. Finally, advanced techniques such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT) were foreseen to have a tremendous impact on future disaster risk reduction.