the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Brief communication: lessons learnt and experienced gained from building up a global survey on societal resilience to droughts
Marina Batalini de Macedo
Marcos Roberto Benso
Karina Simone Sass
Adelaide Cassia Nardocci
Eduardo Mario Mendiondo
Greicelene Jesus da Silva
Pedro Gustavo Câmara da Silva
Abdullah Konak
Nazmiye Balta-Ozkan
Michael Jacobson
Abstract. Drought resilience indexes are essential tools for an evidence-based decision-making process. They can be constructed by enquiring experts about the most relevant indicators. This communication presents the challenges found a priori of creating a global survey with experts in drought. The lessons learned include: (1) the heterogeneity of the conceptual background should be minimized prior the construction of the survey; (2) large number of indicators decreases the engagement of respondents; (3) the format should balance response rate and accuracy, (4) raising diverse experts by knowledge areas, experience and regional representations is difficult, but crucial to minimize biased results.
- Preprint
(621 KB) - Metadata XML
- BibTeX
- EndNote
Marina Batalini de Macedo et al.
Status: open (until 25 Oct 2023)
-
RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-2042', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Sep 2023
reply
The paper offers a fascinating insight into the challenges of creating a global survey, even when this is aimed at experts. It is great to see researchers sharing their experiences, tips, and tricks; it is beneficial for the community when facing similar challenges. Nevertheless, the paper suffers from major limitations, both conceptually and structurally.
The paper presents itself as conceptually confused. First of all, the central topic of the survey, resilience, is poorly discussed. This is particularly crucial since the term is famously contentious, and slippery, and has been fought over by several disciplines. Instead, the researchers choose to define it using the Sendai framework's definition, which is itself vague and meant for high-level decision-makers. This definition comes from the UNISDR terminology dictionary (which is the collection of working definitions used by UNDRR), dating back to 2009. Since then, resilience has largely evolved as a term and has become the focus of much scholarly debate, itself unaddressed in the paper. The authors claim a rigid application of the framework, yet this is seemingly in contrast with the chosen framework and with what they present. This brings me to my next point, the lack of clarity on what resilience is is reflected in the indicators chosen for the index. By their own admission, the authors followed a vulnerability, hazard, and exposure framework, which is usually used to define risk. Hence, the author's definition of resilience is seemingly the inverse of risk. If this is the case, it should be discussed, as it can be the cause of the misunderstandings and resistance that the authors encountered when initially sharing their survey with the respondents. The authors fail to acknowledge how epistemological differences across disciplines can be at the root of the issue of defining resilience, instead indicating “significant variation between regions” (line 147) as the issue. Instead, the usefulness of resilience indicators and how they are seemingly hard to make is repeated several times without providing references.
Structurally the paper is uneven. First of all, the introduction gives an unclear idea of what the scope of the paper is. If your intention is to talk about the challenges and limitations of global surveys you should do that from the start. As it stands, the introduction talks about the importance of global resilience indexes. I suggest focussing from the get-go on the importance of global surveys, their challenges, and what the paper offers. Why resilience indexes are important is secondary. The fact that the authors created a resilience index should be addressed as long as it is used to show the challenges of creating a global index (the challenges of working with a slippery concept, for example), while the importance of a global resilience index is secondary. This can be addressed in two sentences with a good amount of references to support it. I believe that changing the focus of the introduction can also help improve the quality of the paper conceptually, by shifting the focus away from resilience and towards the survey itself. Write the whole introduction about global surveys and global indexes.
Finally, the authors make little use of references, especially in critical statements, such as the use of resilience indexes, and the presence of such indexes in the literature. Additionally, the terminology is often confusing and unclear. While the aim of the study is that of creating a resilience index, the authors refer to it as risk (lines 112, 146, 166), risk and resilience (lines 113, 136, 155). Are the two terms related in your analysis? If yes, state it clearly. Additionally, the paper opens with the statement “Drought is an omnipresent natural disaster”. The term natural disaster is generally considered very controversial (despite being used by the IPCC, for example) and might alienate readers with a background in DRR; I suggest disaster or natural hazard.
Overall, the paper contains very useful information on how to run a global survey of experts that I am grateful the authors decided to share with the community. I particularly appreciated the author’s commitment to highlighting the often-unaddressed a priori assumptions that go into making a questionnaire. Additionally, I found extremely useful the tips and tricks they shared, especially when specific (such as not having more than 40 questions, or keeping it within 15 minutes). I believe that by addressing the structural unevenness of the paper and reducing the focus on the resilience aspect itself, the authors will be able to create a piece of research worth sharing with the community. Thank you very much for your contributions.
Thank you!
Marina Batalini de Macedo et al.
Marina Batalini de Macedo et al.
Viewed
| HTML | XML | Total | BibTeX | EndNote | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 126 | 32 | 7 | 165 | 1 | 1 |
- HTML: 126
- PDF: 32
- XML: 7
- Total: 165
- BibTeX: 1
- EndNote: 1
Viewed (geographical distribution)
| Country | # | Views | % |
|---|
| Total: | 0 |
| HTML: | 0 |
| PDF: | 0 |
| XML: | 0 |
- 1