Drought vulnerability assessment: The case of wheat farmers in Western Iran

Zarafshani, Kiumars; Sharafi, Lida; Azadi, Hossein; Hosseininia, Gholamhossein; Maeyer, Philippe De; Witlox, Frank

doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2012.08.012

Cited by 84 publications

(49 citation statements)

References 32 publications

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“…Therefore, holistic vulnerability assessments for agriculture that reflect the multi-dimensional nature of the concept have received less attention (e.g. Balbi et al 2013;Monterroso et al 2014;Zarafshani et al 2012;Yuan et al 2015). This approach requires: (i) an integrated consideration of cross-disciplinary indicators; and (ii) a suitable normalization or standardization procedure, and aggregation methods (Gain and Giupponi 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing agricultural systems vulnerability to climate change to inform adaptation planning: an application in Khorezm, Uzbekistan

Aleksandrova

Gain

Giupponi

2015

Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change

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Agriculture is one of the most vulnerable sectors to climate change. The current vulnerability assessments through traditional fragmented sectoral methods are insufficient to capture the effects on complex agricultural systems. Therefore, the traditional methods need to be replaced by integrated approaches. The objective of this study is to propose a holistic vulnerability assessment method for agricultural systems. By aggregating both agro-ecological and socio-economic information, we develop an agricultural systems vulnerability index (ASVI) which allows for: (i) a classification of geographical units according to their vulnerability level; (ii) an identification of key determinants of vulnerability for each unit; (iii) an assessment of adaptation policy scenarios considering their effects on the sustainability of the analysed systems. The proposed method is applied in the Khorezm region of Uzbekistan -a representative irrigated agricultural region in the Lower Amu Darya river basin. A decision support tool is used to facilitate multi-criteria decision analysis, including the computation of the index and performing sensitivity analysis of the results. The assessment for Khorezm reveals significant spatial differences of vulnerability levels due to a variation of contributing factors, e.g. natural resources, water productivity, rural-urban ratio. It reveals also that feasible land and water management policies could reduce the vulnerability in Khorezm, particularly in the districts with the poorest agro-ecological conditions. Overall, the proposed method could support national and local authorities in the identification of sustainable adaptation policies for the agriculture sector.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing agricultural systems vulnerability to climate change to inform adaptation planning: an application in Khorezm, Uzbekistan

Aleksandrova

Gain

Giupponi

2015

Mitig Adapt Strateg Glob Change

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“…The integration of variables has oscillated between the consideration of equal weight in the variables, the weighting by academic experts or the local population, and the use of multivariate statistical methods (Wilhelmi & Wilhite, 2002;Pandey, 2010;Zarafshani et al, 2012;Antwi-Agyei et al, 2012). Through these methodologies, areas have been identified with larger relative vulnerabilities and variables with higher incidence.…”

Section: Drought Vulnerability Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

External Drivers and Internal Control Factors that Determine the Vulnerability and Response Capacity to Drought of Cattle Producers in the Sierras Del Este Region of Uruguay

Díaz¹,

Achkar²,

Mazzeo³

2017

JAS

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Increased response and adaptation capacity are key elements for coping with climate threats. Cattle producers in the Sierras del Este region are one of several groups that are the most vulnerable to climate variability in Uruguay. Despite this commonality, it is a heterogeneous system, which suggests that strategies to respond to these events are divergent. The objective of this work is to identify and evaluate the vulnerability of cattle producers to drought and determine drought response strategies. A new approach is proposed and focuses on the identification of differential capacities to address the vulnerabilities. In addition, this approach seeks to define groups of similar producers of vulnerability since the design of public policies cannot be developed in isolation. For evaluation, we provided consultations with livestock producers and specialists from which we collected our data. Data was analysed using multivariate statistical analyses. Our results indicated that 69% of the system's vulnerability variance can be explained by 4 components: the capacity for cattle management, the socio-economic capacity to handle drought, the capacity to generate alternatives to cattle feeding, and the commercial and financial flexibility of the producers. These findings also yielded response groups that, in turn, identified 7 producer groups with significant differences in the available and necessary capacities to respond to drought. This methodological strategy allowed the operationalization of the vulnerability and responsiveness concepts, and the identification of strategies for these events. Additionally, this strategy creates an understanding of the complexity of the system and the variables that contribute to it.

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“…In the case of drought, several studies have assessed the vulnerability to this socio-natural disaster following this approach [31][32][33][34][35][44][45][46]. From a quantitative point of view, most of these studies establish vulnerability metrics based on so-called composite indicators (CI) [47,48].…”

Section: The Indicator-based Approach For Vulnerability Quantificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Methodological consideration: The convergent approach faces the problem indicated by Nguyen et al [56] of "combining the different ways of framing and performing vulnerability analysis" and shows, as stated by Zarafshani et al [45], that "both empirical and theoretical methodologies can be used to combine the hard and soft dimensions of drought vulnerabilities", thereby addressing the "standard method for combining biophysical and socioeconomic indicators". Since the focus of the convergent approach is on vulnerability estimation, for methodological purposes there is a need to have the metrics (indicator-and model-based) for a unit of analysis as a function of the spatial and time scales [16].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Reconciling Drought Vulnerability Assessment Using a Convergent Approach: Application to Water Security in the Elqui River Basin, North-Central Chile

Núñez

Vergara

Leyton

et al. 2017

Water

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Drought has been, is and most likely will remain one of the most significant socio-natural disasters affecting society and the environment worldwide. One priority objective in the adoption of national drought policies is to promote standardized approaches to vulnerability assessment. To reach this objective, however, there is a need to address the noticeable lack of reconciliation between the two major epistemic frameworks that have been used to determine who is vulnerable and why: the so-called outcome and contextual frameworks. This study presents a novel procedure called the convergent approach to assess drought vulnerability under an integral framework. The procedure has been applied to the study of the vulnerability of water security to drought in water-use sectors in a basin located in north-central Chile. The study is justified by the role that drought plays as the major threat to water security in a context of global water crisis. The results show that the convergent approach outperforms traditional procedures such as those based on composite indicators, showing sound robustness and reaching sufficient levels of reliability and validity. The potential expansion of this approach to other applications, such as those related to global estimations of vulnerability to drought, is also discussed.

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Drought vulnerability assessment: The case of wheat farmers in Western Iran

Cited by 84 publications

References 32 publications

Assessing agricultural systems vulnerability to climate change to inform adaptation planning: an application in Khorezm, Uzbekistan

Assessing agricultural systems vulnerability to climate change to inform adaptation planning: an application in Khorezm, Uzbekistan

External Drivers and Internal Control Factors that Determine the Vulnerability and Response Capacity to Drought of Cattle Producers in the Sierras Del Este Region of Uruguay

Reconciling Drought Vulnerability Assessment Using a Convergent Approach: Application to Water Security in the Elqui River Basin, North-Central Chile

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