 Welcome to this talk on Drought Monitoring, Global Perspective. This talk is part of the GIS in Agriculture MOOC. My name is Balaji. I work for the Common Wealth of Learning. My co-author in this talk is Dr. Sridhar, who is based in India. At the end of this talk, you will be able to say or state a few new things. You will be able to say why information is important in drought preparedness. You will be able to state the names of a few agencies or organizations that are involved in drought monitoring. At the global level or at national level in some countries, you will also be able to state that micro-level monitoring of drought is not as mainstream as it should be. Two foundational statements. First, drought preparedness is better than relief. Preparedness is better than relief in many disaster management situations, which is particularly so in drought. Information is the backbone of drought preparedness. Information is the backbone of drought preparedness. These two statements summarize a vast amount of international experience and insights. They are attributed to Professor Donald Wilhite, whose work has led to drought monitoring systems in the United States as well as in sub-Saharan Africa. Preparedness is founded on two activities. One is monitoring, the other is vulnerability and risk assessment. Both these activities, that is monitoring and vulnerability and risk assessment, are information intensive. And GIS is a powerful way to organize, present, and analyze information. This is what you understood in this course so far. GIS therefore provides an excellent set of tools for drought monitoring and vulnerability and risk assessment as well. Most important, these tools can operate on any scale, from global to micro, from global to village levels. Now, let's appreciate that drought preparedness is a perspective. It is a way to integrate a variety of approaches to drought management. It's a new way of looking at drought management. Information is the backbone of drought preparedness, and GIS tools as important information management tools can play a critical role in drought management as a whole. Let's look at some of the systems for drought monitoring available at global scale. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration of US, NOAA or NOAA has brought out a very important service in recent times for drought monitoring. You should visit the URL listed here sometime to get yourself familiar. It's an excellent system that can scale down to county level. Even if you are not in the United States, I would invite you to visit this site and get familiar if you are planning to start your own drought monitoring activities. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations brings out drought monitoring systems and issues alerts. These are more aggregated than what the NOAA system offers. These are more international and synthesis multiple points of view. The United Nations Convention to Combat Decertification is also building a number of monitoring tools for drought. These are going to be heavily science based, and I think we should all keep an eye on the new tools emerging from this very strategic organization. Going to national levels, let's go back to the United States again. The Drought Monitor set up at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln is one of the best in the world. It is a model system. Once again, it can scale down to county levels, and it can provide considerable details for local level planning as well, and they provide weekly alerts which are very, very important in planning and improving preparedness. I would invite you to visit and get yourself very familiar with this system because it's a model system. Australia, which is a large country, is also highly drought prone. The government there has built again an outstanding system for drought monitoring. You can see an aspect of it here with the map interface. I would invite you to visit this site also and get very familiar. These students on this course are from India. The India Meteorological Department also comes out with drought monitoring arrangements, and some of these are published through their website which is listed here. I invite you to visit this particular site. The data is highly aggregated and it's periodically updated. This is also very useful in a lot of planning efforts. From what we have seen, we would agree that drought monitoring on global and national scales is already a mainstream activity in a number of countries. GIS tools are already playing a very big role in maintaining them. A new challenge starts to arise because of division of responsibilities across agencies. Here is one example. A recent news item from India shows that the India Meteorological Department will no longer forecast drought. This department will forecast only deficiencies in rainfall. This is because drought relief is anchored in state or provincial governments and their agencies and they believe they should have the first right to define what drought is. And therefore, nationally created and expert-centric systems and their monitoring data are less important to them than what they are able to gather at local level. How can we overcome these kinds of challenges? Because these are not limited to one country, they are present in practically every country. We believe the best way to do that is to start looking at data at this micro level, at this rural level, where people live and people feel highly vulnerable to drought when it occurs. On this scale, a variety of systems can be more easily integrated and planning action can begin. To be effective, yearly warning and preparedness require a lot of information access and they should be made available through wide variety of channels including the web at the micro level. Relief always occurs at the micro level and that is based on vulnerability assessment which should also take place at the micro level. However, as we have seen, there is a lot of work taking place at global and national level and much less at the micro level. Businesses are available but local capacities are not and here is where the audience in this course who are mostly agricultural students and faculty can make a big difference. You can contribute to training individuals, key individuals at local level to make use of GIS tools so they can build local drought monitoring systems and vulnerability and risk assessment systems. That can make a very big difference to lots of people who undergo or who suffer from the effects of and impact of drought. While concluding this talk, I would like to point out that the entire talk, the slides here are all available for any amount of reuse. You are most welcome to reuse them giving citation to the three agencies mentioned here. There are screenshots used which do not belong to any of these agencies but to the URLs which are cited. Please take note of that carefully and once again we welcome you to make use of the slides here. Thank you.