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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Informatics and Remote Sensing
Volume 12 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2024.1506883

Assessment of meteorological and socioeconomic drought conditions in the Tekeze watershed, northern Ethiopia

Provisionally accepted
Yonas Tesfay Tela Yonas Tesfay Tela *Simachew Bantigegn Wassie Simachew Bantigegn Wassie Mehretie Belay Ferede Mehretie Belay Ferede
  • Faculty of Social Science, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    In northern Ethiopia, meteorological droughts overwhelm crops and often lead people to food insecurity and poverty traps. Socioeconomic droughts similarly aggravate poverty and impact livelihoods; causing significant challenge on communities. Such issues in the area were not researched and not well addressed. Hence, the objective of this study was to evaluate the temporal and spatial trends of meteorological drought and the implied socioeconomic drought impacts in the Tekeze Watershed. The main data sources for this study included survey questionnaires, field observations, and CHIRPS data. Precipitation data from various stations were also employed to validate the CHIRPS data using a random forest regression model. The results revealed a strong coefficient of determination for the model, with values of 0.88, 0.87, 0.88, and 0.84 for the Mekele Obseva, Sekota, Yichila, and Ashere stations, respectively. This indicates that the precipitation recorded at these stations can be well-explained by the CHIRPS data. The temporal trends of meteorological drought showed that most of the years faced shortage of rainfall, where the year 2015 exceptionally faced a severe drought. The drought conditions in the area were exacerbating from time to time with a drought reoccurrence period of 2 years. The socioeconomic drought also found similar results within the agricultural

    Keywords: meteorological drought, Socioeconomic drought, Temporal Trends, mitigation measures, Tekeze watershed, Ethiopia

    Received: 06 Oct 2024; Accepted: 03 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Tela, Wassie and Ferede. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Yonas Tesfay Tela, Faculty of Social Science, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

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