Progress in research on historical extreme drought in China

Current drought-related laws, regulations, plans and standards are targeted to deal with droughts once in 5 to 10 years, without any consideration for extreme droughts characterized by large scope and long duration. Once extreme drought like Chongzhen drought in the late of Ming dynasty or Guangxu drought in Qing dynasty occurs, it will exert severe impacts on the all aspects of our economic society. In the paper, we carry out literature review on the following three aspects:reconstruction of historical flood and drought sequence, restoration and repetition of historical extreme drought. Although the past researches have made great achievements, there are still many needs to be improved. In respect of historical sequence reconstruction, we found that the flood and drought sequences reconstructed by different methods cannot be compared with each other, and the sequences characterized by low temporal and spatial resolution. With regard to historical extreme drought restoration, there is a lack of consideration of the dual attributes of drought. As for historical extreme drought repetition, seldom attention has been paid on drought mitigation capacity and global climate change. Finally, the future research focus and practical demands are forecasted. Breakthroughs need to be made in the following aspects:cross-check between different reconstruction methods, sequence reconstruction with high temporal-spatial resolution, historical extreme drought restoration based on the dual attributes of natural disaster, quantification repetition of historical extreme droughts, and catastrophe risk coping strategy.