Assessment of Drought Vulnerability in Taiwan

Drought does not occur often in Taiwan, but its consequence may be significant since Taiwan is an isolated island located in the Northwestern Pacific Ocean and its climate is marine tropical, with rainy season from May to October and dry season from November to April. Although Taiwan is characterized by high amount of precipitation annually, the country might still suffer from drought due to uneven temporal spatiotemporal distribution of the rainfall and small volume storage capacity of reservoirs. Severe droughts affected Taiwan in the past, such as in years 2020–2021, and had negative impacts on the environment, industry and agriculture. Thus, monitoring and assessing vulnerability to drought is vital for the environmental benefit and agricultural practice for Taiwan. Relationship between transformations of land use/land cover (LULC), drought features, and advised rapid effective indices to derive vulnerable patterns is important to provide useful information about the drought features for the human beings to mitigate its occurance. This paper introduces a framework to assess vulnerability to drought over Taiwan by using 11 indicators organized into three dimensions, including exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Results reveal that vulnerability to drought in Taiwan greatly varies from low to high levels with 25.7% and 13.3%, respectively. Serious drought vulnerability is mainly seen along the western coast of Taiwan. The presented framework is potentially useful in evaluating the vulnerability to drought for different sectors and proper management of water stored in the reservoirs is critical to mitigate the impacts of drought in the context of the climate change.