Fuzzy analytic hierarchy process approach in drought management: case study of Gorganrood basin, Iran

The current research attempts to address three main issues. First, due to the fact that it is difficult to employ a unique drought policy for the whole basin with different land uses, what is the most pragmatic approach to handle this issue? The second issue concerns development of a framework to consider both short-term and long-term strategies. Finally, the last issue is attributed to alleviating uncertainty in drought mitigation problems that must be addressed as a multiple criteria problem rather than a single criterion issue. To address the aforementioned issues, land use categorizing, applying risk management and crisis management, and employment of fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) were considered, respectively. It should be noted that the study was associated with qualitative criteria, subjectivity, uncertainty, and synthesizing the group judgments; however, FAHP performed as a practical tool for decision-making. Raising public awareness for both civil and agricultural sectors stood superior to other strategies with defuzzified scores of 0.331 and 0.360, which are respectively 1.7 and 1.85 times larger than scores of the lowest ranked strategies in their categories. For the environmental sector, applying drought alert systems with a score of 0.507 outperformed the other risk management practices.