New Methodology for the Risk Analysis and Economic Impact Assessment of Agricultural Droughts

Abstract

The paper proposes a new methodology that studies agricultural drought not only in terms of deficit soil water content, its frequency and severity, as in the traditional approach, but also in terms of net benefit. For this purpose the relationship between drought index, crop yield, and crop economic net benefit is modeled and three threshold levels are considered. The first is the critical water content, below which the crop faces water stress (termed as