In this study, a drought impact inventory was constructed by collecting text-based data on South Korea from 1990 to 2019 (Table 1). In South Korea, past drought impact data are predominantly available from government reports. The National Drought Information Analysis Center (http://www.drought.go.kr/) was established in 2015 and manages a database of drought impact information related to the public water supply. In addition, data from news articles were collected using a web crawling method (Manning et al. 2008). The portal site Naver (http://www.naver.com) was selected as it is the most popular search engine in South Korea, providing many news articles. All news articles related to the drought were collected based on keywords, including drought, drought impact, drought damage, impact, and damage, using the ‘including’ filters on the portal site. Morphological analysis was performed on the articles collected, and nouns were extracted by removing unnecessary text, such as symbols and special characters. Subsequently, the extracted nouns were then compared with specific keywords from drought impact categories, such as fire, agriculture, livestock, green algae, and outage. The articles were classified based on relevant sectors, and the drought impacts were classified into categories of public water supply, wildfire, water quality, and agriculture and livestock farming, in line with the EDII technical report (Stahl et al. 2012) for 17 provinces (Figure 2). Finally, duplicate drought impact data were removed based on the date of occurrence of the drought impact.