Evaluating the climatic and socio-economic influences on the agricultural drought vulnerability in Jharkhand

Environmental hazards like drought lead to degrading food production and adversely impact the agro-economy. This study investigates the contributions of different climatic and socio-economic variables to agricultural drought in Jharkhand. The three primary criteria, i.e., exposure (E), sensitivity (S), and adaptive capacity (AC), responsible for agricultural drought vulnerability, were examined to identify the drought-prone areas. Long-term (1958–2020) gridded climatic datasets obtained from the Terra-climate global dataset, MODIS vegetation index dataset (MOD13Q1) for the years 2001–2020, different soil parameters obtained from the ISRIC global soil database and state agricultural portal of Jharkhand, and different socio-economic datasets obtained from census data (2011) provided by Govt. of India, were utilized for this study. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to estimate the weighted contribution of the indicator variables falling under each criterion (E, S, and AC), and three criteria index maps were generated. These separate maps were further integrated to generate the final vulnerability index map. Finally, the study area was categorized into different zones based on the drought vulnerability index value ranging from 0 to 1, according to the severity of the drought. It was observed that about 4.05%, 28.12%, and 37.07% of the total geographical area is very highly, highly, and moderately vulnerable to agricultural drought, respectively. Amongst the three primary criteria, exposure showed a significant positive correlation (R = 0.61), and sensitivity showed a strong positive correlation (R = 0.55) with vulnerability. The adaptive capacity was negatively correlated (R = −0.75) with the vulnerability. However, putting equal weights to the variables to calculate the vulnerability, the exposure and sensitivity indicators showed a significant positive correlation with the vulnerability, with an R-value of 0.82 and 0.79, respectively. In contrast, the adaptive capacity showed a negative correlation with the vulnerability with R = −0.75.