The urgency for drought resilience planning has never been greater. With rapid changes in land use and increasing impacts from climate change, communities need to determine ways to meet their drought planning goals. Montana is forging new ground to join agencies, resource managers and communities to plan for drought impacts and build drought resilience. The State of Montana and the National Drought Resilience Partnership (NDRP)–a collaborative of federal and state agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and watershed stakeholders–are working together to leverage and deliver technical, human and financial resources to help address drought in the arid West.
The Missouri Headwaters Basin in southwest Montana was selected as one of two national Drought Resilience pilots by the NDRP to demonstrate collaborative efforts to build resilience.. The Basin plays an important role in landscape connectivity in the northern Rockies, experiences frequent drought, and faces rapidly changing population and land use. Although local groups in the area recognize the need to prepare for drought, they lack the human and financial capacity to fully utilize planning tools and implement solutions. Federal and State resources can assist greatly with drought monitoring, forecasts, and early warning systems, but the information isn’t always readily accessible to local planners and decision makers.
The goal of the Missouri Headwaters Drought Resilience Demonstration Project is a two-way proposition – to deliver government drought mitigation tools and resources to watershed stakeholders who need them, and to build information from local groups in direct contact with the landscape. This project will produce a model for information sharing, efficient water use and storage, and community collaboration. It will also prepare people to mitigate for drought while preserving cultural and ecological values in the face of a drier future. In September 2015, Montana’s NDRP members and local watershed representatives met in Dillon, Montana, in the heart of the Missouri Headwaters Basin, to identify shared goals for developing drought preparedness plans and mitigation strategies. From this meeting and two previous meetings, the group drafted a workplan that identifies objectives and implementation tasks required to assure drought resiliency basinwide.
