Muhammad Rasool Al-Kilani – Department of Environmental Justice Research
Vast areas of land designated for the cultivation of strategic crops such as wheat and barley in Karak suffered complete crop failure due to the 2022 droughts, while the farmers of the Southern Mazar, the Moab district, and several areas in Karak demanded that the government declare a drought emergency. But after assessing the rainfall season, and dam levels, the government announced that declaring a drought emergency did not meet the standards.
A research team from the National Center for Environmental Justice and the University of Jordan, in cooperation with the National Center for Drought Mitigation at the University of Nebraska, assessed drought conditions in the Karak region using two drought indices, the first was the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) which was developed in 1993 in the United States and requires only precipitation data, and the second was the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI), which was developed in 2010 as a modified version of the SPI, and takes into account precipitation in addition to factors related to the loss of moisture from the soil and plants, such as temperature, thus helps in accounting for global warming.
The results of the analysis showed that when using SPI, a drought event was not detected in Karak in 2022, and this could explain why the government did not announce a state of drought in Karak, as their evaluation is based on rainfall and dam levels only to assess drought conditions. However, when using the SPEI, it was found that Karak experienced the worst drought in 40 years, and it may be the most intense in the history of the region. It was found that this extreme drought event started in February and extended until the end of the grains season in June.
The results demonstrate the need to amend the standards used in Jordan to declare a status of drought and to develop an emergency protocol for droughts that are caused by multiple meteorological factors and are not limited to rainfall deficit only.
The currently adopted method in Jordan, which is limited to taking precipitation exclusively into consideration, has its advantages, such as simplicity and ease of use, but it has become necessary to use more sophisticated indices and to study the patterns of droughts associated with different meteorological factors and the dimensions of their impact on agriculture, specifically on strategic crops in Jordan.
