Ms. Bageshree KATNESHWARKAR will be delivering a presentation regarding her doctoral dissertation. The details are as follows.
Presenter: KATNESHWARKAR Bageshree
Date and Time: Monday, December 5, 2022, 13:30 to 15:00
Place: Ishikawadai 4 B03/04, Ookayama campus, Tokyo Institute of Technology
Chairing Teaching Staff: Prof. Kinouchi Tsuyoshi
Thesis Title: “Quantitative investigation of drought impacts on agriculture and relation with socioeconomic security of farmers”
Panelists: Prof. Tsuyoshi KINOUCHI, Prof. Manabu KANDA, Assoc. Prof. Takashi (恭志) NAKAMURA, Assoc. Prof. Takashi (隆志) NAKAMURA, Assoc. Prof. Alvin C.G. VARQUEZ
Abstract
Recurring droughts and its dire consequences on the agriculture sector is challenging the socioeconomic security of farmers in agrarian countries like India. The complex, multidimensional, spatially extensive, and water extreme phenomenon of drought is the costliest natural disaster which is anticipated to be frequent and more severe in the warming world. The profound impacts of droughts include agriculture failures, groundwater depletion, water scarcity and economic losses, which is specifically threatening the agriculture, and allied businesses. Under the deteriorating socioeconomic status of farmers subject to frequent droughts, especially in central parts of India, drought assessment holds a paramount importance. Multiple climatic and hydrologic factors are responsible for droughts and vegetation conditions, where meticulous attribution of these primary drivers and understanding of their integrated effect is crucial for holistic drought quantification and disaster contingency planning. Despite a well-established system of drought management in India, which is typically univariate and depends on analysis of multiple variables, the process has its own limitations where this integrated effect is typically overlooked, frequently leading to ambiguous drought categorization. In the present study, dynamics and variability in vegetation and its interlinkage with regional drought characteristics were analyzed in the form of greening and browning trends along with discerning the governing factors and their possible implications on the farmers in the central state of Maharashtra in India. Furthermore, using the confounding primary drought drivers, a novel multivariate Joint Drought Index (JDI) was proposed for seasonal agriculture drought classification which shall provide a unique perspective for drought monitoring and mitigation by increasing the accuracy of drought severity analysis in India and beyond. Moreover, taking farmers suicide as an index showing the socioeconomic status of farmers, the possible relation between vegetation variability, dynamics in hydroclimatic variables, droughts, and role of JDI in the farmer’s socioeconomic status is also discussed. The results of this study should provide crucial insights for policymakers in India and worldwide and should be valuable for revisiting the drought management plans and creating efficient drought mitigation systems in areas facing harsh conditions of droughts.