Australia's National Drought Policy: Fid-Bau Portal

Australia's National Drought Policy

White, David H. / Karssies, Linda

Australia has a highly variable climate, giving it the reputation as a land of droughts and flooding rains. A National Drought Policy was agreed to by Commonwealth (Federal), State, and Territory Ministers in 1992, reaffirmed in 1994, and revised in 1997. It aims to encourage primary producers and other sections of rural Australia to adopt self-reliant approaches to managing for climatic variability, to maintain and protect Australia's agricultural and environmental resource base during periods of extreme climate stress, and to ensure early recovery of agricultural and rural industries, consistent with long-term sustainable levels. These aims can be met by providing research, extension, and education services to assist producers to plan for and cope with a variable climate and by ensuring that there are no financial incentives for inappropriate management practices. The extent to which these aims are being met is still a matter of debate. Given that a sequence of El Niño-based events that started in Queensland in 1991 culminated in much of Australia experiencing abnormally low rainfall throughout 1994 and into 1995, the commonwealth government needed measures to determine which areas had been exposed to exceptional drought so that financial assistance could be directed as effectively as possible. For an area to be declared as experiencing “drought exceptional circumstances,” (DEC) the extent and severity of drought had to be assessed as being beyond the bounds of normal risk management. In this paper we discuss our recent experiences in estimating the extent and severity of drought in the arid, temperate, and subtropical regions of Australia, and progress in developing methods and regionally sensitive indicators to aid assessments of “drought exceptional circumstances.”