Abstract
Natural hazards such as agricultural droughts impact negatively on crop yields and economic activities. Characterization of agricultural droughts provides precise and accurate information for decision making processes during agricultural drought events. Planning and responding to the hazards by government, and non-governmental organizations in the Sudano-Sahelian belt has been limited in the past due to knowledge gap on the nature and impact of the hazard. This study seeks to characterize historical agricultural droughts, assess their impact on crop yields and people’s susceptibility to undernourishment and through forecasting, unravel what the future holds. Annual effective reconnaissance drought index values are computed using mean monthly potential evapotranspiration and effective precipitation data. To assess the impact of agricultural drought, the index’s values are compared to crop yields and prevalence to undernourishment data. Results show that agricultural drought events of 1983 and 2008 are mild and ephemeral while the 1999 – 2006 event is severe and protracted. While there is 26% chance of materialization of an agricultural drought in Gourma, the chance of being ephemeral and of moderate category is the highest (8%). It has been determined that an ephemeral and moderate agricultural drought would trigger below average yields for maize, sorghum and millet. Mild, moderate and severe events increase prevalence to undernourishment by 2.9 %, 4.3 % and 5.8 % respectively. From 2020 to 2030, a continued materialization of agricultural droughts is expected
Highlights
The use of drought indices for the identification and description of intensity, severity, duration and aerial extent of drought events is referred to as drought characterisation (Iglesias et al, 2007)
The use of index-based methods to analyse historical agricultural drought events enables the characterisation of previous events, development of future agricultural drought scenarios and the ability to develop monitoring mechanisms for agricultural drought indicators which are key in planning for Governments and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) (Liu et al, 2020)
Outcome of calculating the 5-month eRDIst reveals the occurrence of three agricultural drought events between the years 1979 and 2013 with varying characteristics
Summary
In 2014, about 4 million Burkinabés that is a quarter of the entire population were reported to have been affected by drought in the country (Guha-Sapir, 2019). In 2018, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) reported that more than 954,300 Burkinabés faced food insecurity and malnutrition caused by environmental shocks such as drought, floods and insecurity (USAID, 2018). The Burkinabé government has promised to prepare a national drought management plan in accordance with the structure of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) ratified in Paris (1974) (Global Water Partnership-West Africa, 2019; UNCCD, 2019). National drought plans are living documents and characterisation of agricultural drought is key for the preparation and implementation of the drought plan (Berbel and Esteban, 2019). Agricultural drought characterisation is valuable for the assessment of future agricultural drought risk, determination of the impact of drought on agriculture as a sector, preparation and implementation of drought preparedness plans and for the establishment of an agricultural drought monitoring mechanism (Rossi et al, 1992). Understanding the characteristics of drought is vital for the sustainable development of the agricultural sector and economic development (Han et al, 2021)
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