Managing floods and droughts synergistically: A transformative governance approach

Floods and droughts cause large economic and environmental impacts and incalculable human suffering. Despite growing evidence of important synergies in their management, floods and droughts tend to be mostly managed in silos. The synergistic management of flood and drought risk is limited by the inability of current governance systems to change at the scope, depth and speed required to address the emerging challenges of climate change induced hydroclimatic risks. Building on the concept of continuous transformational change and combining key elements across sectoral governance frameworks, this paper proposes a transformative governance conceptual framework that enables national governments to work across silos in a whole of government approach to lead a whole of society effort to manage the whole hydroclimatic spectrum. Spain, a country with an advanced hydroclimatic risk management system, is presented as an illustrative example to explore the possible idiosyncrasies of implementing the proposed changes on the ground. © 2025 Núñez Sánchez et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publisher: Public Library of Science