Drought propagation across meteorological, hydrological and agricultural systems in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin

Drought produces cross-system impacts, and these interactions between multiple systems are also referred to as drought propagation. However, the complex natural processes and anthropogenic disturbances lead to the drought propagation process being non-linear and systems feedback, which is still lack of knowledge in large-scale basins. To address these challenges, we propose a hydro-economic coupled model and investigate drought propagation across meteorological-hydrological-agricultural systems. The results from the Lancang-Mekong River Basin show that drought propagates from the meteorological system to the hydrological system and is weakened by the basin storage capacity. This propagation process shows spatial heterogeneity caused by basin characteristics, highlighting that the upstream (CS location) and downstream (KR and KC location) are more prone to hydrological drought vulnerability. As drought further propagates to the agricultural system, water abstraction behaviours can alleviate the drought situation, leading to crop yield increases ranging from 6.9% to 39.3% through irrigation pathways. Unfortunately, irrigation behaviour also worsens hydrological drought in a feedback loop, where downstream KR (SRI increases by almost 90%) shows more intense variation than upstream PA (SRI increases by around 12%), illustrating the feedback among multi-systems and accumulation in spatial. Moreover, upstream hydropower and downstream agricultural water use show synergistic relationships, revealing that efficient anthropogenic interventions can mitigate the impact of drought on human well-being. This paper provides an in-depth understanding of the complex drought propagation process in nature-human highly coupled Mekong, which may help policymakers and basin managers to better cope with drought.