| 03 Nov 2025
Towards an operational European Drought Impacts Database (EDID)
Abstract. Drought impact information is essential to move from reactive management to a proactive approach. Data on drought impacts provide regional insight into vulnerability and support robust risk assessment and sustainable adaptation strategies. Drought impact data are also essential to build and validate models for advanced impact forecasting, including AI enhanced tools. While there is increasing consensus on the operational use of specific physical drought hazard indices, to date there is no generally accepted convention on drought impact data collection and use. Based on experience and content of several regional research databases, the development of a European Drought Impact Database (EDID) explicitly aims for operational application within the framework of the Copernicus European Drought Observatory. This article gives insight into the implementation of EDID, its structure and attributes, and provides an analysis of the content. Among the nine impacted systems, agriculture, public water supply and aquatic ecosystems contribute a majority of the impact records. Over the covered time period, impacts became more variable in the system they describe and recent years show some more extremely severe impacts according to a newly introduced severity score. Mapped at country scale, the impacts confirm previously identified European sectorial impact hotspots. The work and product show that regional datasets can be integrated and add valuable information to an international European database. Public accessibility now provides the opportunity for update and improvement by mobilizing the European drought community.
Review of: Towards an Operational European Drought Impacts Database (EDID)
This study addresses a very important gap in the development of drought-impact databases—an essential resource for assessing drought vulnerability and accurately evaluating drought risk. The manuscript not only presents the methodology for constructing such a database at the European scale, but also clearly describes its structure and provides a preliminary sectoral analysis of drought impacts. Moreover, the database is conceived as a living resource, with the capacity to be regularly updated and to incorporate regional information, which gives the study strong potential for future enhancement.
The manuscript is well written and well structured. The introduction is well documented, offering a thorough, up-to-date state of the art and clearly establishing the relevance of creating such a database. The description of the database is particularly informative, detailing not only the categories of impacts but also the associated intensity levels. It might have been desirable to include additional information sources on drought impacts at national and regional scales, although I understand that such data may not be available for many countries. In any case, since this is a dynamic and open database that will continue to evolve, new databases and information sources can be incorporated in the future. The semi-automatic approach using AI is also valuable and will likely yield further improvements in the coming years.
A notable strength of this work is the integration of diverse data sources. Combining information from media reports, government documents, scientific literature, and other sources is a challenging task, and the authors have made a commendable effort to harmonize these data and classify them by impact type and severity.
The spatial and temporal analysis of drought impacts is particularly useful, as it highlights the interannual variability of impacts and their increasing dynamism. The spatial analysis also reflects current limitations in the database, particularly regarding the uneven geographic coverage, with southern European countries being under-represented despite frequently experiencing severe drought impacts. This is an issue to address in the future, perhaps by engaging with research teams working on drought-impact monitoring in these regions.
Finally, the discussion section is very informative and well organized. It effectively explains the relevance of the new database, acknowledges its current limitations, and outlines the planned steps for its improvement.
In summary, this is a high-quality and novel study that fills an important gap. It represents the result of several years of effort dedicated to compiling, classifying, and harmonizing drought-impact information from multiple sources. I recommend publication as is.