Understanding and managing drought in Australia - What do we know? What do we need to know?

Our ability to monitor, model, forecast and manage drought in Australia, and to differentiate between and understand the causes and impacts of the different types of droughts (e.g. meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, socioeconomic) is exposed as insufficient every time a drought occurs. This paper reviews the existing literature on i) defining, monitoring and forecasting drought, (ii) drought causes and impacts, (iii) instrumental and pre-instrumental insights into Australias drought history and (iii) observed variability in, and expected future changes to, the frequency, magnitude, duration, location and spatial extent of drought in Australia.