Drought can be slippery. Take Texas for example.

For more than a year, the state has been in the stranglehold of a record dry spell, part of a wider drought that has plagued the American Southwest for years. More than 95 percent of the state is experiencing some level of drought, according to the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor.

Gripped by conditions expected to last through the winter, water has been rationed, lakebeds have gone dry (revealing all sorts of interesting secrets), and cattle are dying. Last week, Spicewood Beach, a suburb of Austin, became the first place in Texas compelled to shuttle in H2O. Yet only a day earlier, the Associated Press announced that Dallas—a mere 200 miles north—was the first Texas locale to officially shake off the drought.

These disparities in the severity and range of a single disaster can be confusing for the uninitiated. Even those that know better don’t always grasp the full impacts of looming or worsening drought. Perhaps it’s because drought lacks an obvious beginning and doesn't demand our attention until there are serious impacts. Or maybe it’s because drought is perceived as local, even though the effects are often global. It could be that it’s just human nature to look up and wait for an answer to come from the sky.

Whatever the reason, drought is a serious problem that hasn’t been given enough attention—and not just in the Southwest and other drought-stricken U.S. regions. Most of the world has refused to wrap its head around drought risk. The dearth of good data was spotlighted at the UN International Strategy for Disaster Reduction’s Third Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction in Geneva, Switzerland, last May.

“Comprehensive assessments of drought risks are only just beginning and, as yet, there is no credible global drought risk model,” wrote the authors of the Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction 2011 (known as GAR11), which was presented at the platform. “Strengthening drought risk management, as an integral part of risk governance, will be fundamental to sustaining the quality of life in many countries during the coming decades.”

Managing drought risk is no easy task. Drought involves not only a shortage of water, but also a scarcity of wealth, environmental awareness, and political will. GAR11 outlines three kinds of drought—meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological—as well as a bevy of risk drivers such as poverty, urbanization, industrialization, and climate change.

Especially in the U.S. Southwest, a Gordian knot of water rights based on the assumption that there would always be the same amount of water to go around proves difficult to untie to meet new realities. At the same time, efforts to stanch increased demand for water are scant.

“There’s not enough fresh water to handle nine billion people at current consumption levels,” Patricia Mulroy, the Southern Nevada Water Authority general manager and a Water Research Foundation board member, told Smithsonian magazine last year. “People need a fundamental, cultural attitude change about water supply in the Southwest. It’s not abundant, it’s not reliable, it’s not going to always be there.”

Between the tyranny of nature and the greed of man, maybe the only thing to do is to put our heads in the sand and hope that water will come. That's the current tack worldwide, according to GAR11, which states that “despite increasing evidence of the magnitude of drought impacts, few countries have developed drought risk management policies or frameworks, and the political and economic imperative to invest in reducing drought risk remains weakly articulated.”

Only a few countries may be looking drought in the eye, but one has made particularly good progress. Australia, the only nation with a national drought policy, has taken huge steps to address its decade-long Millennium Drought. Using a “wide range of technical, economic, regulatory, and educational policies” the country has been able to cut water consumption by 37 percent, double desalination capacity in its largest cities, and still reduce withdrawals from its overtaxed Murray-Darling river, according to Scientific American.

The Australian example could easily translate to the U.S. Southwest, particularly to the Colorado River Basin. More than one water expert has pointed out the similarities between the Colorado and the Murray-Darling—both support growing cities, agriculture based on irrigation, and have been drained dry before they could flow to the sea.

And like the Colorado, which is controlled by thirsty states and archaic water agreements, the Murray Darling was also in the clutches of its surrounding states. That was until the states gave up control.

“They’ve always jealously guarded their prerogatives around water,” Western Water Assessment Director Brad Udall, who spent four months working with the Australian Department of Water, told High Country News. “In 2007, in the midst of this drought, those states voluntarily gave up their right to control their water to a brand new entity…. In 2006, I think if you had asked people in Australia in the states if they were going to give up that power, they would’ve said, ‘Absolutely no.’”

Perhaps then, there’s hope on the horizon. What’s not clear is if other nations will need to see the sort of life-threatening, economy-crushing drought that Australia did before they come around. Hopefully not, as that approach doesn't leave many options.

“I heard on the news a while back that some town got an Indian to come and do a rain dance,” the New York Times quotes Spicewood Beach resident Connie Heller as saying. “We may have to do that.”