Assessment of Resilience to Drought of Rural Communities in Iran

Abstract

In recent years, drought has inflicted significant damage on agriculture and rural communities in Iran. Resilience is the capability of communities to handle and tolerate exterior pressures such as drought. The purpose of this study was to identify the indicators affecting social resilience against drought, determining the cause of reduction or increase of resilience in different regions. It also focuses on strategies for increasing resilience of rural communities through the provision of social services in Iran. The required information was collected using a questionnaire from five villages, including 237 villagers who were selected through snowball method. Shannon’s entropy and COPRAS methods were employed to determine and classify the drought resilience. The results show that some indicators like modified irrigation methods and new methods of coping with drought have devoted the highest weight. Also, there is a significant relationship between resilience rating of villages with average age of the households and number of households in nonfarm job. Finally, absolute drought resilience of rural communities remained in moderate situation. Doing study in wider areas to coordinate the effective indicators in the matter and studying how empowerment of local communities by providing a variety of social services can be considered as a further research in the future.

Keywords:

• COPRAS methods
• drought
• resilience
• rural communities
• Shannon’s entropy

Disclosure statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.