A Novel Method for Agricultural Drought Risk Assessment

Climate change, increased temperatures and imbalanced precipitation distributions will potentially increase the local drought risk in certain areas. Drought assessment can identify the hidden dangers of drought and provide a theoretical basis for disaster prevention and mitigation. In this paper, a new agricultural drought risk assessment method proposed from the perspective of grain yield. The first principal components of precipitation, temperature, humidity and soil moisture represent hazard factors. The sensitive yield, which represents the sensitivity, was separated from the grain yield using a regression method. Additionally, the trend component of the grain yield represents the adaptive capacity, and the crop planting area represents exposure. Based on these definitions, the concepts of unit drought risk and regional drought risk are proposed. Four cities in Heilongjiang Province, which has the highest grain yield of any province in China, were used as application examples, and the spatial and temporal variation in the agricultural drought risk were analyzed. Application example show that the method for evaluating agricultural drought presented in this paper is reasonable in a statistical sense. The process for calculating sensitivity and adaptability shows that this method is suitable for arid and semi-arid areas, where grain yield is sensitive to hazard factors, and areas where grain yield has a certain trend.