Drought-MRM: Towards a drought-management readiness model for rural communities

Climate change has induced a 12-year long drought in Central Chile, and rural communities are typically unprepared to mitigate hydric stress. Unfortunately, there is still no clear, standard way to assess a community's capability to manage its drought situation. This article presents Drought Management Readiness Model (Drought-MRM), a capability maturity model to assess drought-management capabilities of rural families and small farmers and participatory priority-driven of improvement roadmaps. Drought-MRM has four domain areas (KDA): Efficient water use, Infrastructure, Drinking water, and Strategic capacities; thirteen key process indicators (KPI), with several capability levels each; and four maturity levels (Lacking, Basic, Intermediate, Sustainable) to assess each family readiness to manage drought. Drought-MRM was built by interviewing domain experts to determine drought-management contents; asking a review by capacity maturity model experts to check its formal aspects; and running a focus group in a rural community to validate model applicability and instruments usability. Ongoing work with water-management experts has built a catalog of stepwise interventions, which are used as building blocks to synthesize priority-driven, family-specific improvement roadmaps. A Drought-MRM pilot study is currently under way in two rural communities, and will chart a way towards wider deployment in the rural zones of Valparaíso, enabling families to better manage a water-scarcity situation that has no improvement in sight.