Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Drought is one of the natural hazards that has badly affected agricultural, environmental and economic sectors, especially in arid and semi-arid regions. Iran, which located in the semi-arid region had been hits by successive drought cycles. Thus, this paper analyses monthly rainfall data for Iran from 1991 to 2015 to detect drought cycles and its impact on the agricultural sector. For that standardized precipitation index (SPI) was used to track drought waves. SPI was divided into five groups (3,6,9,12,24). Simultaneously, agricultural production was collected for the same period. Results from SPI-12 showed that Iran had been hits by four drought waves, first time was from 1999 to 2002; the second cycle was from 2008 to 2009; while the third cycle was from 2011 to 2012; recently the period from 2014 to 2015 was considered to be dry also. Noticeably, the agricultural failure (rainfed) was significantly correlated to drought years, which can be illustrated easily from tracking the agricultural production changes. Interestingly the period between 2008-2009 was recorded to be the worst years among others, where SPI-12 reach to -2.59 and classified as extreme drought. Drought as an indicator of climate change in Iran required a vital effort to minimize the consequences especially, in the agricultural sector. Therefore, a policy maker should prepare a regional plan for climate hazard mitigation and adaptation.