Assessing drought vulnerability using geospatial techniques in northwestern part of Bangladesh

Drought is a damaging and costly natural disaster that frequently affects many climatic regions in the world. A multi-criteria-based approach for integrated spatial drought vulnerability mapping that combines all drought categories is required to generate detailed vulnerability information for formulating drought mitigation strategies. This study presents a spatial multi-criteria integrated approach for mapping comprehensive drought vulnerability using geospatial techniques and an analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The developed approach was applied in the northwestern region of Bangladesh to justify its applicability. A total of 17 criteria under 4 drought categories, namely, meteorological, agricultural, hydrological and socio-economic, were selected. Moreover, spatial layers for each criterion were developed. AHP was used to calculate the weights for each criterion and drought types using pair-wise…