A meta-multicriteria approach to estimate drought vulnerability based on fuzzy pattern recognition

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to explore a new integrated approach to estimate drought vulnerability taking into account the characteristics of a system that make it likely to be affected by an external risk. A meta-multicriteria approach is adopted since the problem itself modulates the multiple criteria method. Firstly, relevant information is grouped into drought sensitivity and adaptive capacity criteria. Ιnstead of the estimation of a unique score for the vulnerability, a classification of the vulnerability to drought into several categories is proposed. Based on the maximum and minimum values of the above criteria initially, four non-ordered categories are established initially to characterize the vulnerability to drought. In order to classify water-scarce countries into the four or more categories the fuzzy pattern recognition is exploited. The proposed approach is applied to estimate drought vulnerability in selected Mediterranean countries. A choice that strengthens the meta-multicriteria character of the proposed approaches is that the categories are not ordered, but they are modulated from all the combination of the extreme points.