Abstract
Drought is amongst the most precarious natural hazards associated with severe repercussions. The characterization of droughts is usually carried out by the sector-specific (meteorological/agricultural/hydrological) indices that are mostly based on hydroclimatic variables. Groundwater is the major source of water supply during drought periods, and the socio-economic factors control the aftermaths of droughts; however, they are often ignored by the sector-specific indices, thereby failing to capture the overall impacts of droughts. This study aims to circumvent this issue by incorporating hydroclimatic, socio-economic and physiographic information to assess the overall drought vulnerability over Narmada River Basin, India, which is an agriculture-dominated basin highly dependent on groundwater resources. A Comprehensive Drought Vulnerability Indicator (CDVI) is proposed that assimilates the information on meteorological fluctuations, depth to groundwater level, slope, distance from river reach, population density, land use/land cover, soil type, and elevation through a geospatial approach. The CDVI showed a remarkable geospatial variation over the basin, with a majority (66.4%) of the area under highly to extremely vulnerable conditions. Out of 35 constituent districts of the basin, 9, 22, and 4 districts exhibited moderate, high, and extreme vulnerability to droughts, respectively. These results urge an immediate attention towards reducing drought vulnerability and enhancing resilience towards drought occurrences. The proposed multi-dimensional approach for drought vulnerability mapping would certainly help policy-makers to proactively plan and manage water resources over the basin, especially to ameliorate the pernicious impacts of droughts.
Highlights
Drought is a precarious natural hazard, which mankind has been scrambling since ages
Applied Water Science (2022) 12:14 capita Annual Water Resources (AWR), over 20 nations have been in water-stressed conditions by 1996, and the number is expected to increase further, leading to two-third of the global population face water paucities by 2050 (Gosain et al 2006, 2011)
This study proposes a novel metric, i.e. Comprehensive Drought Vulnerability Indicator (CDVI) to incorporate multiple factors viz. dry year frequency, depth to groundwater
Summary
Drought is a precarious natural hazard, which mankind has been scrambling since ages. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, the global freshwater availability will be reduced by 10–30%, and about 5–10% fall in global runoff will occur by the middle of the twenty-first century (Suryavanshi et al 2014; Swain et al 2021). All these concerns encourage a detailed analysis and management of droughts; an explicit physical quantification of drought and its attributes is a perplexing geophysical endeavour
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