Author’s response to the comments made by the anonymous reviewer on the manuscript, “Masih, I.: An evaluation on the alignment of drought policy and planning guidelines with the contemporary disaster risk reduction agenda, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2024-163, in review, 2024.”

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your time and effort in reviewing this manuscript, and providing your valuable comments. These are highly valued and much appreciated. Please find below a preliminary response. More detailed reply will be provided as part of the revised submission, after all the comments are received and a common strategy to address those suggestions is formulated.

Review comment: Overall this is a good manuscript with some really interesting insights on the guidelines related to drought response.

Response: Thank you very much for your kind words of appreciation. These are encouraging and add to the confidence and motivation to further develop this work.  

Review comment: Risk reduction versus risk management: with Sendai coming into place their has been more reference to risk management as opposed to risk reduction and I see this manuscript is framed around risk reduction so it would be interesting to highlight the alignment with the current discussions on risk management in a more explicit way.

Response: Thank you very much for your valuable comment. In the current manuscript both risk reduction and risk management are used interchangeably. However, following on the review comment, both terms and associated conceptual framing will be examined in more detail. The terms will be clarified in the revised manuscript. Moreover, the risk management will be made explicit and the document will be strengthened on this aspect.

Review comment: Context: It would be very helpful to provide some context for the guidelines selected for analysis. This helps in providing some background on why they score the way they do.

Response: This is a very helpful comment for the benefit of the readers who are not familiar with drought policy and planning guidelines. More information will be added on the context and background of the examined guidelines. The additions will be made in the Table 1, which summarizes the examined guidelines.

Review comment: Scoring scale: The scoring scale (it would be good to provide an explanation on the range which is very wide - maybe would have been better to have 1-5 or 1-10 as the range to better capture the nuance as the long range does not reflect in the results thus there is failure to convey the nuances within the range (e.g 11-30 - an area with 12 and another at 29 are still grouped together with no further breakdown). The UNISDR framework ran until 2021 (2016-2021) - so possibly mention this context.

Response: Thank you very much for your critical insight on the scoring scale. This point is very important and will be addressed with a careful examination. However, changing the scoring scale will be weighed for the pros and cons, and then a decision will be made either to keep the current scale or change it to one of the two options proposed by the reviewer. In any case, more explanation on the range will be added to strengthen the evaluation grid presented in Table 2. Moreover, the results will be strengthened by providing more nuanced justification of the categorization.

The last part of the comment, “The UNISDR framework ran until 2021 (2016-2021) - so possibly mention this context” is not fully clear on which framework is referred here. In case this is SENDAI framework, the timespan is 2015-2030, and this could be elaborated further. It will be very helpful if the reviewer can clarify this point.

Review comment: Multi-hazards: What about multi-hazards? it is important to have reflections around this as there is quite some focus on this with climate extremes becoming more frequent and intense thus need for a more comprehensive approach in dealing with hazards and I believe this submission should include this aspect.

Response: Indeed, dealing with multiple hazards is very important, especially in the light of observations and future predictions indicating climate extremes becoming more frequent and intense. Reflections around multi-hazards will be added in the revised manuscript. Currently, a brief information is provided under section 3.2.2 (Weaknesses), which will be elaborated further.

Dear Ana,

Thanks for your spending your valuable time and efforts in reviewing the manuscript and providing very helpful comments. I fully agree with your comments and will carefully address those in the revised manuscript. I work on providing more information and discussion on the linkages and synergies between social and technical aspects, which will certainly strengthen the quality of the manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ilyas