Spatial assessment of vulnerability to drought in agricultural sectorCase study: Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province

Most of the methods used to measure the vulnerability of agricultural sector to drought, did not use the opinions of different experts or did not pay attention to the environmental and climatic differences of the regions, or gave the same weight to all the indicators used in the models. The question is how can assess the vulnerability by using the experts’ opinion from different domains? In this paper, the Bhattacharya and Das model were used to assess the drought vulnerability, and 16 experts were asked to determine the weight of the indicators using hierarchical analysis method. Then, according to the specified weights, a vulnerability map was prepared. The findings show that there is a difference of 3.5 times between the exposures of different zones. Also, a difference of 3.6 times was observed between the most sensitive areas and least sensitive areas. The adaptive capacity also shows a difference of 2.6 times in zones with maximum and minimum adaptive capacity. The findings also show a difference of 17.6 times in areas with the highest vulnerability to areas with the least vulnerability. No direct correlation between rainfall and degree of vulnerability to drought was also observed.