Assessment the impacts of climate change on drought in the Ba River basin, Central Vietnam using Landsat remote sensing data

Abstract

Sustainable management of the river basin is a profound challenge for environmental management in the context of climate change. Drought situations in a basin occur in relation to meteorological, hydrological, agricultural factors and climate change as well. In this study, remote sensing technology was applied to assess the impacts of climate change on drought in the Ba River basin, Central Vietnam. Drought in the basin has been created by land use/land cover changes in recent years, which has resulted in a sharp decrease in forest area in the period 1989 to 2019 (-41.5%) and a significant increase of agricultural land with 38.2%. Following that, the area of drought agriculture rose by 28.8%. The remarkably high drought areas in agricultural land were in El Nino years, 2016 (99.2%) and 2019 (87.3%), which indicated that under climate change impacts, a drought occurred more severely. Moreover, drought also appeared in the forest. The forest area deceased but the drought levels in the forest increased slightly since 2005 and hit a peak drought value in 2016 with 97.0% of forest area. During El Niño years, the precipitation, atmospheric moisture, and water flow in the basin were all lower than in previous years.