Savelli Elisa, Rusca Maria, Cloke Hannah, Di Baldassarre Giuliano
Department of Earth Sciences, Air, Water and Landscape Science Uppsala University Uppsala Sweden.
Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS) Uppsala Sweden.
Wiley Interdiscip Rev Clim Change. 2022 May-Jun;13(3):e761. doi: 10.1002/wcc.761. Epub 2022 Jan 23.
Human activities have increasingly intensified the severity, frequency, and negative impacts of droughts in several regions across the world. This trend has led to broader scientific conceptualizations of drought risk that account for human actions and their interplays with natural systems. This review focuses on physical and engineering sciences to examine the way and extent to which these disciplines account for social processes in relation to the production and distribution of drought risk. We conclude that this research has significantly progressed in terms of recognizing the role of humans in reshaping drought risk and its socioenvironmental impacts. We note an increasing engagement with and contribution to understanding vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation patterns. Moreover, by advancing (socio)hydrological models, developing numerical indexes, and enhancing data processing, physical and engineering scientists have determined the extent of human influences in the propagation of drought hazard. However, these studies do not fully capture the complexities of anthropogenic transformations. Very often, they portray society as homogeneous, and decision-making processes as apolitical, thereby concealing the power relations underlying the production of drought and the uneven distribution of its impacts. The resistance in engaging explicitly with politics and social power-despite their major role in producing anthropogenic drought-can be attributed to the strong influence of positivist epistemologies in engineering and physical sciences. We suggest that an active engagement with critical social sciences can further theorizations of drought risk by shedding light on the structural and historical systems of power that engender every socioenvironmental transformation. This article is categorized under:Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives.
人类活动日益加剧了世界上几个地区干旱的严重程度、发生频率及其负面影响。这种趋势促使人们对干旱风险进行更广泛的科学概念化，将人类活动及其与自然系统的相互作用考虑在内。本综述聚焦于物理科学和工程科学，以研究这些学科在干旱风险的产生和分布方面考虑社会过程的方式和程度。我们得出的结论是，这项研究在认识人类在重塑干旱风险及其社会环境影响方面的作用方面取得了显著进展。我们注意到，在理解脆弱性、恢复力和适应模式方面的参与度和贡献在不断增加。此外，通过推进（社会）水文模型、开发数值指标和加强数据处理，物理科学家和工程科学家已经确定了人类在干旱灾害传播中的影响程度。然而，这些研究并没有完全捕捉到人为转变的复杂性。它们常常将社会描绘为同质化的，将决策过程描绘为非政治化的，从而掩盖了干旱产生背后的权力关系及其影响的不均衡分布。尽管政治和社会权力在人为干旱的产生中起着主要作用，但在明确涉及政治和社会权力方面存在阻力，这可归因于实证主义认识论在工程和物理科学中的强大影响。我们建议，积极参与批判性社会科学可以通过揭示导致每一次社会环境转变的结构性和历史性权力系统，进一步推动对干旱风险的理论化。本文分类如下：气候、历史、社会、文化>学科视角。
