Farmer's attitudes to drought and its management (Case study: Zanjanroud watershed)

Drought is a climate catastrophic that rural communities have always facing with its multiple effects of that, including: economic and social problems. The purpose of this study was to measure the attitude of farmers towards drought and its related factors in Zanjanroud basin of Zanjan city. Descriptive survey method was used in this research. Data collection tool was a questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was approved by a panel of academic experts. Pre-test and calculating Cronbach's alpha coefficients were used to measure the reliability (0.74). Farmers in Zanjanroud watershed formed the population of the study and 140 samples were selected using cluster sampling. The findings of the study showed that the attitude of farmers to drought and its management is somewhat more justice than rational and farmers have little faith in the possibility of reducing the effects of drought with drought management practices. The result of Correlation analysis showed that there is significant and inverse relationship between age and attitudes to drought and a significant positive correlation between education and income with attitudes to drought. The result of stepwise multiple regression analysis showed that 24.8 percent of the variability in the attitude to drought explained by two variables including income and age