Journal of Spatial Analysis

The latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) on climate and global warming Indicates that climate change and global warming in particular is one of the most important challenges of the world and drought, as a consequence of climate change around the world, has always influenced the many countries, including Iran. However, it seems that the climate changes, particularly in the West and Iran, especially among farmers and rural communities vulnerable to the effects of economic, social and environmental impacts that are more significant. In other words, Continuous droughts are faced villagers and farmers with various problems and challenges, In this regard, villagers Choose the local and specific strategies in the face of this creeping disaster that improve them adaptive capacity to drought. Nowadays, special emphasis is put on the notion of adaptive capacity instead of vulnerability. So the need to have research in rural levels obvious, especially in Iran where there has not yet been any deep and encompassing study on the concept of adaptive capacity in rural level. adaptive capacity to climate change is the ability of a system or an individual to adjust to climate change or climate variability so as to minimize the potential damages or cope with the consequences. Therefore, adaptive capacity is the ability to plan and use adaptation measures to moderate the effect of climate change. There is an increasing need to develop indicators of adaptive capacity to determine the robustness of response strategies over time and to understand better the underlying processes.

Adaptive capacities of villagers depend on certain factors or attributes such as their knowledge on and number of times they use a particular adaptation strategy. Other factors are the availability and accessibility of the adaptation strategy. Also, the number of consultations that a villagers makes on a particular adaptation strategy affect whether the villagers will be lowly or moderately or highly adaptive to drought.

Identifying the overall level of adaptive capacity to drought in rural areas, in order to Effective management is special importance, Because that by identifying and ranking of adaptive capacity in rural areas, adopt appropriate management strategies to reduce the damage caused by drought is possible.

Therefore, the purpose of this study is assessing the adaptive capacity to drought of between four villages in the central part of the city Rawansar in Kermanshah province. For this purpose five most effective and important index to measure the  adaptive capacity to drought as follows:  Knowledge, Use, Availability , Accessibility and Consultation, according to the literature, were selected. Then by using one sample T-test, the effectiveness of each of the above-mentioned indicators on the villagers adaptive capacity were reviewed and approved from the point of view Village contributors of the central city Rawansar (N = 48) who were selected by census method. In the next step, to determine the index weight, using the snowball technique and purpose sampling, 10 experts in jahad  agricultural  office in Rawansar city were selected and their comments were used. The results by TOPSIS technique based on these indicators, showed that rural areas of Hasan Abad and Zalu Ab  in the Rawansar city, had the greatest adaptive capacity to drought, While  rural areas of Dawlat Abad and Badr had fewer adaptive capacity to drought. The Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) is a multi-criteria decision analysis method, which  is based on the concept that the chosen alternative should have the shortest geometric distance from the positive ideal solution (PIS)and the longest geometric distance from the negative ideal solution (NIS).It is a method of compensatory aggregation that compares a set of alternatives by identifying weights for each criterion, normalising scores for each criterion and calculating the geometric distance between each alternative and the ideal alternative, which is the best score in each criterion.The findings of this study could have recommendations for rural planners to effective crisis management in order to reduce vulnerability and enhance resilience villagers to drought.