Evaluating the Effects of Lake Urmia’s Drought on Resilience Changes in Rural Settlements

Journal of Research and Rural Planning

مقاله 2، دوره 6، شماره 4 - شماره پیاپی 20، بهار 2018، صفحه 67-89  

نوع مقاله: علمی

شناسه دیجیتال (DOI): 10.22067/jrrp.v5i4.59430

نویسندگان

Ali Majnouni Toutakhane ¹؛ Vakil Heidari Sareban²؛ Mojtaba Mofareh Bonab¹

¹University of Bonab

²University of Mohaghegh Ardabili

چکیده

Extended abstract
1. INTRODUCTION
Drought as a natural disaster has inflicted material and spiritual damages to mankind and has challenged the life and civilization of human societies with serious challenges. Today, many of the human settlements have direct dependence on climatic factors, particularly drought, and this dependence is more significant in rural communities. While by adopting measures, it is possible to reduce the risk appetite of communities such as rural communities in the face of such incidents. One of the concepts that has been considered in minimizing the risks in rural areas is resiliency. The concept of resilience is the result of the evolution management of risk and seeks to understand the way of influencing the social, economic, institutional, structural, political, and physical capacities against a variety of hazards of human communities. Lake Urmia has begun to dry up in the last two decades and has lost nearly 90 percent of its area. This phenomenon has led to a lot of damages to villages and reduced their ability to survive.
2. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Experts believe that living in the context of natural risks is not necessarily harmful, but the lack of resilience and the level of knowledge and understanding of the population about the treatment and risk may cause damage. That is the reason of the significant and global changes in the attitude toward risk; hence, the dominant approach of the poor focus on reducing the vulnerability has shifted to increasing the resilience against disasters. According to this view, the plans for reducing risks should seek to establish and strengthen the resiliency features in the communities. Resilience is one of the most important factors in achieving sustainability. The concept of resilience was introduced in social-ecological systems. In fact, the concept of resiliency is the ability of a social or ecological system to absorb and deal with irregularities or disruptions so that people are able to keep up with the structure of basic functions, have the capacity of reorganization and capacity to adapt to the changes and tensions.
3. METHODOLOGY
The data was collected via questionnaires distributed among inhabitants of rural regions that were 25 kilometers far from the shore of Lake Urmia. The total number of villages was estimated to be 42 villages with 13696 inhabitants. Using Cochran formula and the simple random sampling method, the sample size was 370. Moreover, 370 people were selected from the villages which were 25 kilometers far from Lake Urmia. The data gathering methods for answering the research questions were documentary and survey methods. Using Cronbach alpha special formula, the reliability of the questionnaire was obtained to be between 0.86 and 0.88. The variables used in this study consisted of 67 cases that had been chosen based on five dimensions of resiliency. For statistical analysis, the Spearman and multivariate regression tests were used, and to assess the resilience of rural areas and the special model of measuring resilience, optimized resiliency model was used.
4. DISCUSSION
Based on the results, economic resilience with a 20% deviation from the optimal, environmental resilience a 46% deviation from the optimal, and social resilience with an 8% deviation from the optimal are in the best situation compared to other dimensions. Based on the results of Spearman correlation coefficient, the maximum correlation of the rural resilience and the increase of distance from the Lake is for the environmental resilience (r=0.874). Based on the obtained standard beta, the variables of environmental resilience, social-cultural resilience, and economic resilience, infrastructural and physical-structural resilience are the variables that receive the highest level of change caused by the drought of the lake. Additionally, these predicator variables predict 87% of the variance. The results show that the contribution of drying in Urmia Lake in explaining the rural resilience regarding economic, socio-cultural, environmental, infrastructure and physical structure dimensions is 0.489, 0.411, 0.677, 0.420, and 0.450, respectively. Moreover, the spatial analysis of the rural resilience shows that the economic and social resilience of villages in southern and eastern parts of the Lake Urmia is higher than other parts. The environmental resilience of the villages of the northern and western sides is higher than other segments. Finally, the structural resilience of the villages in eastern side of the lake is better than the other sides.
5. CONCLUSION
According to the results, the resiliency of villages around the Lake Urmia is less than the villages which are far from the lake. In addition, the analytical results of the research confirmed the relationship between the dimensions of resilience and drought. The correlation of the environmental variables is more than the others. Five dimensions could explain 87 percent of the changes. Also the research findings showed that there is a difference in terms of resiliency between the villages in different directions of Lake Urmia. Finally, according to research findings, the following recommendations are presented:
• Increasing awareness of people, modifying crop patterns, looking for strategies for saving water consumption, and making use of efficient products are of high importance.
• Changing the dominant approach from the poor focus on reducing the vulnerability against drought crisis to increasing the resilience in the face of this crisis.
• The formation of a multi-sectoral structure to integrate the macro and strategic decisions of drought crisis management and planning through coordinating related agencies.

کلیدواژه‌ها

Resilience؛ Vulnerability؛ drought؛ Lake Urmia؛ rural settlements

مراجع

1. Adger, W. N. (2000). Social and ecological resilience: Are they related? Progress in Human Geography, 24(3), 347-364.

2. Andreadis, K. M., Clark, E. A., Wood, A. W., Hamlet, A. F., & Lettenmaier, D. P. (2005). Twentieth-century drought in the conterminous United States. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 6(6), 985-1001. ‏

3. Beckman, M. (2006). Resilient society, vulnerable people: A study of disaster response and recovery from floods in central Vietnam (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Sweden.

4. Berkes, F., Colding J., & Folke, C. (2003). Navigating social-ecological systems: Building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

5. Bruneau, M., Chang, S. E., Eguchi, R. T., Lee, G. C., O’Rourke, T. D., Reinhorn, A. M., ... & Von Winterfeldt, D. (2003). A framework to quantitatively assess and enhance the seismic resilience of communities. Earthquake spectra, 19(4), 733-752. ‏

6. Carpenter, S., Walker, B., Anderies, J. M., & Abel, N. (2001). From metaphor to measurement: resilience of what to what? Ecosystems, 4(8), 765-781. ‏

7. Coughlin, S. S., Leadbetter, S., Richards, T., & Sabatino, S. A. (2008). Contextual analysis of breast and cervical cancer screening and factors associated with health care access among United States women, 2002. Social science & medicine, 66(2), 260-275. ‏

8. Cutter, S. L., Barnes, L., Berry, M., Burton, C., Evans, E., Tate, E., & Webb, J. (2008). A place-based model for understanding community resilience to natural disasters. Global environmental change, 18(4), 598-606.

9. De Florio, V. (2015). On resilient behaviors in computational systems and environments. Journal of Reliable Intelligent Environments, 1(1), 33-46.

10. Diffenbaugh, N. S., Swain, D. L., & Touma, D. (2015). Anthropogenic warming has increased drought risk in California. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(13), 3931-3936. ‏

11. Downing, T. E., & Bakker, K. (1998). Drought discourse and vulnerability: Environmental change unit (1th ed.). London: University of oxford Press.

12. Escalona, J., Flexas, J., & Medrano, H. (2002). Drought effects on water flow, photosynthesis and growth of potted grapevines. Vitis-Geilweilerhof-, 41(2), 57-62. ‏

13. Folke, C., Carpenter, S., Elmqvist, T., Gunderson, L., Holling, C. S., & Walker, B. (2002). Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. AMBIO: A journal of the human environment, 31(5), 437-440. ‏

14. Friend, R., & Moench, M. (2013). What is the purpose of urban climate resilience? Implications for addressing poverty and vulnerability. Urban Climate, 6, 98-113.

15. Garg, A. X., Nevis, I. F., McArthur, E., Sontrop, J. M., Koval, J. J., Lam, N. N., ... & Segev, D. L. (2015). Gestational hypertension and preeclampsia in living kidney donors. New England Journal of Medicine, 372(2), 124-133. ‏

16. Giannecchini, M., Twine, W., & Vogel, C. (2007). Land‐cover change and human–environment interactions in a rural cultural landscape in South Africa. The Geographical Journal, 173(1), 26-42. ‏

17. Godschalk, D. (2003). Urban hazard mitigation: Creating resilient cities. Natural Hazards Review, 4(3), 136-143.

18. Gretzel, U., Fesenmaier, D. R., Formica, S., & O’Leary, J. T. (2006). Searching for the future: Challenges faced by destination marketing organizations. Journal of Travel Research, 45(2), 116-126. ‏

19. Gunderson, L. H., Holling, C. S., Pritchard, L., & Peterson, G. D. (2002). Resilience of large-scale resource systems. Scope-Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment International Council of Scientific Unions, 60, 3-20. ‏

20. Dadashpoor, H., & Adeli, Z. (1394/2015). Measuring the Amount of Regional Resilience in Qazvin Urban Region. Journal of Emergency Management, 4(8), 73-84. [In Persian]

21. Heydari Sareban, V. (1394/2015). Investigating the ways of dealing with drought in rural areas from the perspective of agriculture organization (Case study: Isfahan province). Journal of Geography and Environmental Study, 4(15), 19-34. [In Persian]

22. Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual review of ecology and systematics, 4(1), 1-23. ‏

23. Jalili, S., Hamidi, S. A., & Namdar Ghanbari, R. (2016). Climate variability and anthropogenic effects on Lake Urmia water level fluctuations, northwestern Iran. Hydrological Sciences Journal, 61(10), 1759-1769.

24. Lebel, L. (2001). A resilience centered approach for engaging stakeholders about regional sustainability: an example from the Goulburn Broken catchment in Southeastern Australia, Journal of environmental science, 5(4), 98-115.

25. Li-xin, W. A. N. G. (2010). Definition of Drought Waterlogging Indexes and Analysis of Drought Rule in Huludao City [J]. Acta Agriculturae Jiangxi, 1, 1-23. ‏

26. Maracchi, G. (2000). Agricultural drought—a practical approach to definition, assessment and mitigation strategies. In Drought and drought mitigation in Europe (pp. 63-75). Springer Netherlands. ‏

27. Mayunga, J. S. (2007). Understanding and applying the concept of community disaster resilience: a capital-based approach. Summer academy for social vulnerability and resilience building, 1, 16-33‏.

28. Mokhtari, D. (1389/2010). The evaluation of the position of geomorphology in assessment of natural disasters in Iran. Journal of Geography and Land, 3(9), 51-65. [In Persian]

29. Pimm, S. L. (1984). The complexity and stability of ecosystems. Nature, 307, 321–326.

30. Rockström, J. (2003). Resilience building and water demand management for drought mitigation. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C, 28(20), 869-877.

31. Rutter, M., Thapar, A., Pine, D. S., Leckman, J. F., Scott, S., Snowling, M. J., & Taylor, E. (2015). Resilience: concepts, findings, and clinical implications. Rutter's Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 341-351. ‏

32. Sapirstein, G. (2006). Social resilience: the forgotten dimension of disaster risk reduction. Jàmba: Journal of Disaster Risk Studies, 1(1), 54-63. ‏

33. Simelton, E., Fraser, E. D., Termansen, M., Forster, P. M., & Dougill, A. J. (2009). Typologies of crop-drought vulnerability: an empirical analysis of the socio-economic factors that influence the sensitivity and resilience to drought of three major food crops in China (1961–2001). Environmental Science & Policy, 12(4), 438-452. ‏

34. Timmerman, P. (1981). Vulnerability, resilience and the collapse ofsociety. A ReviewofModels and Possible Climatic Appli-cations. Toronto, Canada. Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Toronto. ‏

35. Tonts, M., Plummera, P., & Argentb, N. (2014). Path dependence, resilience and the evolution of new rural economies: Perspectives from rural Western Australia. Journal of Rural Studies, 36(87), 362-375.

36. Traerup, S. (2007). Coping with climate change vulnerability: Issues related to development, Journal of Environmental Management, 43(1), 743-752.

37. Tsakiris, G., & Vangelis, H. (2004). Towards a drought watch system based on spatial SPI. Water Resources Management, 18(1), 1-12. ‏

38. Twigg, J. (2007). Characteristics of a disaster-resilient community: A guidance note. (For Community participation), Frist edition, UK (London): Teddington Publication.

39. Twigg, J. (2007). Characteristics of Adisaster-Resilient Community a Guidance note. Version 1 (for Field Testing) August 2007, for the DFID: 325-336

40. Upadhyaya, H. D., Dwivedi, S. L., Singh, S., Sahrawat, K. L., & Singh, S. K. (2016). Genetic variation and postflowering drought effects on seed iron and zinc in ICRISAT sorghum mini core collection. Crop Science, 56(1), 374-383. ‏

41. Vasquez-Leon, M., West, C. T., & Finan, T. J. (2003). A comparative assessment of climate vulnerability: agriculture and ranching on both sides of the US–Mexico border. Global Environmental Change, 13(3), 159-173. ‏

42. Zhou, H., Jing’ai W., Jinhong W., & Huicong, J. (2009). Resilience to natural hazards: A geographic perspective. Natural Hazards, 2(3), 17-25.