Abstract

This study assessed the agricultural drought vulnerability in Lower Benue River Basin in the Savanna region of Nigeria. To achieve this objective, data on rainfall and minimum and maximum temperature were collected from the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (1987–2017). The remote-sensing data from Landsat images of 5, 7, and 8 of 30 m spatial resolutions were, respectively, for the years 1987 and 1997, 2007, and 2017. We used these data to derive Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Land Surface Temperature (LST), Soil Moisture Index (SMI), and Digital Elevation Model (DEM) of the entire basin. We used ArcGIS 10.1 software to perform weighted overlay analysis of the criteria considered and chose Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) to perform data interpolation. The agricultural drought hazards were assessed for 1987, 1997, 2007, and 2017. The study identifies four different drought vulnerability classes (very low, low, moderate, and high vulnerable zones). The results showed that 32 percent of the basin area is vulnerable to agricultural drought while 68 percent is considered non-vulnerable. The study further revealed that the northern part of the basin is highly vulnerable while the southern part is low in vulnerability. The implications of the results were highlighted in the study.