SIDE: Socially Informed Drought Estimation Toward Understanding Societal Impact Dynamics of Environmental Crisis
This addresses the need for human-centric drought mitigation strategies by incorporating societal perspectives, though it is an incremental advance in applying AI to environmental monitoring.
The paper tackles the problem of drought monitoring by developing SIDE, a framework that jointly estimates drought severity and societal impact using social and news media data, demonstrating superior performance over state-of-the-art baselines in experiments on California and Texas datasets.
Drought has become a critical global threat with significant societal impact. Existing drought monitoring solutions primarily focus on assessing drought severity using quantitative measurements, overlooking the diverse societal impact of drought from human-centric perspectives. Motivated by the collective intelligence on social media and the computational power of AI, this paper studies a novel problem of socially informed AI-driven drought estimation that aims to leverage social and news media information to jointly estimate drought severity and its societal impact. Two technical challenges exist: 1) How to model the implicit temporal dynamics of drought societal impact. 2) How to capture the social-physical interdependence between the physical drought condition and its societal impact. To address these challenges, we develop SIDE, a socially informed AI-driven drought estimation framework that explicitly quantifies the societal impact of drought and effectively models the social-physical interdependency for joint severity-impact estimation. Experiments on real-world datasets from California and Texas demonstrate SIDE's superior performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines in accurately estimating drought severity and its societal impact. SIDE offers valuable insights for developing human-centric drought mitigation strategies to foster sustainable and resilient communities.