Need for regional and national drought policies
In recent years, drought planning has been moving from a crisis management approach, based on national or regional drought emergency programmes, to a risk management approach, based on the development of comprehensive, long-term drought preparedness policies and plans of actions intended to significantly reduce the risks of, and vulnerabilities to, extreme weather events.
In response, in 2013, the Global Water Partnership Central and Eastern Europe (GWP CEE) initiated the Integrated Drought Management Programme (IDMP CEE) within the framework of the joint, global WMO/GWP Integrated Drought Management Programme. The scope of this programme (WMO/GWP, 2011) is “to support stakeholders at all levels by providing them with policy and management guidance through the globally coordinated generation of scientific information and sharing best practices and knowledge for integrated drought management”.
Drought in Central and Eastern Europe
In February 2013, the IDMP CEE was launched with the involvement of over 40 organizations from 10 CEE countries. The primary beneficiaries of the IDMP CEE are government institutions and agencies responsible for developing drought management policies and/or implementing systems for drought monitoring and prediction and drought risk mitigation and response, at multiple time scales and regional, national and local spatial scales.
The secondary beneficiaries are decision makers and managers whose task is to implement these policies, including drought mitigation and adaptation.
Review of current status
In 2013, following up on its Inception Phase, the IDMP CEE conducted an additional review of current status with increased attention to assessing the integration of drought issues into the first RBMPs. The results of a questionnaire survey completed by all 10 CEE countries were summarised in the Report on review of the current status of implementation of the drought management plans and measures.
This report showed that the majority of countries had not prepared a DMP in accordance with the EU’s Water Framework Directive (“in case country consider drought as a relevant issue for them, they should produce DMP as part of the RBMPs). General guidelines are provided in the EU Technical Report Drought Management Plan Report Including Agricultural, Drought Indicators and Climate Change Aspects (European Commission, 2007). IDMP CEE additional prepared special Guidelines for developing DMP for CEE region.
Compendium of Good Practices 
The final publication of the first phase of the GWP/WMO Integrated Drought Management Programme in Central and Eastern Europe is the Compendium of Good Practices. It provides an overview of the programme’s outputs and accomplishments achieved in the period from 2013 to 2015. Each activity is described in a way that first main objective is emphasized, background (on which processes or similar initiative activity was based), how the implementation took place and links to the main outputs on IDMP CEE sub-web page.
Download the Compendium of Good Practices.