Measuring drought impact in more than dollars and cents

The standard way to measure the impact of drought is by its economic effect. Last year, for example, the severity California's four-year drought was broadly characterized by an estimate that it would cost the state's economy 2.7 billion and 21,000 jobs. However, there are many experts who feel economic measures alone are inadequate to fully assess the impact of this complex phenomenon, which affected more than one billion people worldwide in the last decade. They argue that there is an urgent need to come up with better methods for measuring the overall effects of drought because the duration and severity of droughts are widely expected to increase in the future due to global warming. To provide such a comprehensive view, a pair of Vanderbilt doctoral students has assembled a multi-disciplinary team of graduate students from around the country to conduct a multi-faceted study of how people are affected by and responding to drought conditions in the United States.