Assessment of Indicators for Agricultural Vulnerability to Drought in the Municipality of Taal

Abstract

Drought is one of the many natural hazards that threatens the agricultural sector. To mitigate its harmful impacts, vulnerability assessment is conducted to create environmental and natural resources management strategies. The use of indicators and weighting procedure play important roles and are crucial steps toward assessing vulnerability. This study identifies and evaluates the necessary indicators in assessing the vulnerability of agricultural resources in Taal, Batangas to drought. Comprehensive data gathering was conducted in the form of Focus Group Discussions (FGD) with farmers, agriculture experts and the local government unit to extract critical information and to determine the vulnerability indicators that are relevant to the study. Agricultural resources map produced through the Phil-LiDAR 2 Program were used to identify the different agricultural classes in the area. The importance of indicators are quantified by computing their weights through the implementation of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) which establishes relation between the indicators through pair-wise comparison. AHP was also implemented on agriculture classes through the judgment of several agricultural experts. The result showed that soil types, human sensitivity and percent of annual income for non-agricultural activities are the indicators that garnered the highest weights for the vulnerability factors exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity respectively.