Space-Based Drought Disaster Risk and Climate Change Assessments: Strategies for Environmental Conservation
摘要
Conserving the environment and ecosystems in a changing climate poses major challenges for environmental managers and society. Effective adaptive strategies for dealing with climate change-related disasters such as drought require a spatiotemporal systems perspective. Remote sensing data was obtained from the US Geological Survey database. More so, the regional climate scenario Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) of the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) was used to assess the future climate scenario from 2006 to 2050 using a Python script. The result showed that the entire study area was severely affected by drought disasters mostly in the year 2015 followed by 2003, 2005, and 2018 with drought condition index ranges between 40% and 0%, across the area, where most of the water-reliant sectors might have been affected during the period based on Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. Analysis from the study shows that the precipitation and temperature trends for the RCP 8.5 scenarios over the study area vary from one part to the other. This study suggests the possible adaptive actions that the regional and national environmental managers could take and the outcomes of this study suggest hotspots for conserving the environment and ecosystems under climate change and shift toward ecologically based environmental and disaster management. More so, the adaptive strategies highlighted in the study would contribute to drought disaster management.