This article was first published on iklimriskleri.com and migrated with a July 2026 update.
Drought is one of climate change’s most insidious physical risks: dwindling water resources, disruptions to energy production and falling crop yields are just a few examples. Nor is it an abstract future scenario — in 2025, İzmir went through a historic water crisis in which its main source, the Tahtalı Dam, dropped as low as 0.13% of capacity. In this article, we summarize the four types of drought, the İzmir case, and the resolution constraint in climate projections.
The Four Types of Drought
| Type | What happens? | Typical outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Meteorological | Precipitation deviates sharply from the long-term average | Precursor to all other drought types |
| Agricultural | Soil moisture cannot deliver enough water to the plant root zone | Yield losses; risks to food security and income |
| Hydrological | Dams, lakes, rivers and groundwater fall below normal (with a time lag) | Reservoir levels drop, flows shrink, hydropower output declines |
| Socioeconomic | Impacts spill over into society and the economy | Food and energy prices rise; welfare and economic stability are shaken |
These four types may look like separate textbook headings, yet they are links in the same chain: a rainfall deficit hits the soil first, then the reservoirs, and finally the tap and the economy. In Mediterranean-belt countries like Türkiye — where agriculture and hydropower depend on the same rainfall, and precipitation varies sharply from year to year — the chain can run especially fast.
The Chain in Real Life: İzmir’s 2025 Water Crisis
The Tahtalı Dam, the city’s most important water source, went from 10.68% full in July 2025 to 0.13% on December 30, 2025. Meteorological drought turned into hydrological drought within months; nighttime water cuts in 13 districts began on August 6, and the crisis, in its socioeconomic dimension, entered the daily lives of millions of city residents. The cuts ended only when winter rains lifted the level to 14.88%.
The July 2026 picture is relatively comfortable, but far from reassuring:
| City | Reservoir level | Date |
|---|---|---|
| İstanbul | 59.71% | July 15, 2026 |
| İzmir | 48.47% | July 12, 2026 |
| Ankara | 46.57% | July 12, 2026 |
Even in a relatively “normal” year, major cities enter the summer with reservoirs only half full. Drought is now a primary climate risk not just for agriculture but for cities and municipalities as well; that is precisely where the need arises for tools like Kent Envanter, which supports water and climate planning with neighborhood-scale inventory records.
Why Can’t Global Models See a Local Crisis?
The global climate models underpinning IPCC reports mostly run at coarse spatial resolution (grids of 100 km or larger); a single grid cell can span several cities. A microclimate in a narrow valley, or extreme drought on the Aegean coast, can dissolve into the model’s averaged values: a region that shows “no change in precipitation” in a global model may hide sharp contrasts between neighboring districts. Tahtalı is living proof — the conditions that pushed İzmir into crisis could easily become invisible inside a 100-kilometer grid average.
The Data-Driven Solution
Regional models and statistical downscaling demand deep expertise and heavy computing power. UrClimate Next uses its machine learning-backed infrastructure to produce high-resolution, validated drought projections, while UrClimate Score rates physical risks including drought at scales running from the dam basin down to the individual facility. Decision-makers — from water utilities and industrial companies to insurers and municipalities — can then see what the four types of drought mean for their own assets, without hiding behind global averages. The first step in managing drought risk is seeing it at the right scale; as the İzmir case shows, when that step is skipped, the last link in the chain reaches all the way to the city’s taps.
