Elin Stenfors: Drought Vulnerability in Cold-Climate Socio-Hydrological Systems: Exploring sectoral patterns, municipal contexts, and shifting perceptions

Abstract

In a changing climate, proactive risk management is increasingly advocated to reduce the complex and costly nature of drought impacts. Modern disaster-risk approaches conceptualize risk as a function of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability. Yet, vulnerability is in itself complex, varying across contexts and shifting over time. Across five interlinked studies, this thesis explores how drought vulnerability is shaped in forest or tundra dominated cold climate regions, using a combined top-down and bottom-up research design.

Papers I–III integrate a systematic literature review for the broader study region with a confirmatory survey of Swedish water-dependent sectors, assessing how these sectors perceive the influence of literature-derived vulnerability factors on drought risk. Papers IV and V use a repeated survey distributed to Swedish municipalities in 2018 and 2023 to analyze how municipal experiences, risk perceptions, and management approaches evolve over time and in relation to observed drought conditions.

The results demonstrate that drought vulnerability in forested cold climates is shaped more by biophysical and governance related factors than by socioeconomic factors tied to basic needs or human development. Vulnerability in the study region differs across sectors and water-dependence profiles, while foundational cross-sectoral vulnerability factors emerge from biophysical characteristics and governance capacities such as drought-related policies, planning, coordination, and awareness. The thesis also highlights persistent misalignments among sectors, researchers, and authorities, including limited policy implementation, inconsistent terminology, and perceptual dynamics that complicate proactive drought risk management. The repeated survey further reveals the temporal complexity of drought risk perception, which the results indicate is shaped more by event magnitude than by simple exposure frequency.

Together, these findings support a cold-climate conceptual framing that integrates biophysical vulnerability, governance capacity, and sector-specific vulnerabilities shaped by water dependencies. Its implications for policy and practice include i) specifying drought type and associated sectoral vulnerabilities in assessments and risk management, ii) developing drought indicators aligned with local realities, and iii) strengthening drought related governance capacities and science-authority-stakeholder exchanges within socio-hydrological systems. Overall, these findings also underscore the need for vulnerability assessments to account for context and water-type dependencies, rather than relying on generic indicator sets.