Drought risk assessment in the western part of Bangladesh

Though drought is a recurrent phenomenon in Bangladesh, very little attention has been so far paid to the mitigation and preparedness of droughts. This article presents a method for spatial assessment of drought risk in Bangladesh. A conceptual framework, which emphasizes the combined role of hazard and vulnerability in defining risk, is used for the study. Standardized precipitation index method in a GIS environment is used to map the spatial extents of drought hazards in different time steps. The key social and physical factors that define drought vulnerability in the context of Bangladesh are identified and corresponding thematic maps in district level are prepared. Composite drought vulnerability map is developed through the integration of those thematic maps. The risk is computed as the product of the hazard and vulnerability. The result shows that droughts pose highest risk to the northern and northwestern districts of Bangladesh.