An approach to assess drought vulnerability with multi criteria analysis

This study is aimed to establish an approach for estimating drought vulnerability using multi criterion decision making methods. Drought has spatially wide-ranging effects, its duration is difficult to predict, and long-lasting damages. For this reason, the conversion of drought damage into an amount of money or physical quantity is difficult. Accordingly, policy makers and researchers have difficulty in securing grounds for determining countermeasures against drought disasters. Thus, to determine drought vulnerability, factors with long-term impact on social and economics need to be taken into account. The evaluation approach consisted of three stages: evaluation factor and weight identification, database construction, evaluation data and weight combination. In this study, the factors to assessing drought vulnerability was identified using Delphi method, and the drought vulnerability was determined by the TOPSIS method which is a widely used MCDM method.