Agricultural Drought Risk Management Using Fuzzy MADM Methods in Ferdows County of Iran

Agriculture is one of the most important vulnerable sectors regarding drought phenomenon with significant impacts on the economy of countries. In many previous studies, drought risk management has been mentioned as one of the best scientific methods of drought management. In this regard, this study was conducted in Ferdows County, South Khorasan province of Iran, aiming at both identifying the drought risk indexes to assess agricultural drought risk factors of the region and providing a framework to plan an operational risk response. Precise determination of these indexes and their relative importance makes it possible to assess and analyze drought risk of that region; moreover, a definite framework for agricultural drought risk management can be developed. In this paper, a list of possible drought risk response actions was provided and then they were prioritized. Based on this initial prioritization, cost and difficulties of executing each drought risk response action, the final prioritization of drought risk response actions were determined. Since the risk assessment indexes and drought risk response actions were evaluated based on opinions of experts and linguistic variables, Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchal Process was used to determine the weight of each risk index, and Fuzzy TOPSIS was applied to determine the priority of risk response actions. The study results indicated the pivotal role of “reducing the groundwater and surface water use of agricultural activities” in addressing the agricultural drought and “subsurface irrigation” as the best reaction treatment