Data injustice and attribution of drought events implications for global climate policy

Extreme event attribution (EEA) studies address the question of the role of anthropogenic climate change in the occurrence of extreme weather events. However, there is an ongoing debate between science and policy actors on whether EEA can inform the Loss and Damage mechanism. Because EEA needs local observational data, it could be affected by the ‘data injustice’ that plagues data-poor regions. This paper focuses on droughts and assesses whether the geographic location of EEA studies matches the location of recorded drought hazards and observed drought impacts, using a data justice lens and multiple metrics. We find that the location of EEA studies correlates moderately with the location of drought events .56. It does not correlate with the location of countries where droughts generated famine, food shortage, and crop failure .13, of countries where people were most affected by droughts .11, and with countries’ agricultural vulnerability to droughts .00; it correlates negatively with countries facing high water stress −.03. Conversely, we found a strong correlation between EEA studies and drought-related economic damages .92. This finding provides compelling evidence that data injustice limits the scope of EEA science. In turn, this questions the suitability of EEA results in the international allocation of climate funds for Loss and Damage.