Facing up to drought events: Understanding the potentials and challenges within farming systems

Drought events, in combination with social, economic, and environmental issues such as food prices, limited access to water, and soil degradation, have made farmers more vulnerable in society. Therefore, focusing on traditional, conventional, and organic agricultural systems, this study evaluates social, economic, and environmental aspects of drought events along with the impacts of adaptation strategies on them simultaneously and globally. According to the findings, hydrological droughts have an average economic impact of approximately 1.2% on traditional agricultural systems. Furthermore, drought has significant socioeconomic effects, causing a 1.9% decrease in average livelihood in organic agricultural systems. However, drought does not have a statistically significant impact on conventional agriculture. The findings also revealed that conventional agriculture depends on expensive off-farm inputs that use large quantities of non-renewable fossil fuels. In addition, the selection of adaptation strategies in traditional agricultural systems led to an improvement in the economy (0.14%), livelihood (0.86%), and environment (0.62%). Overall, this study highlights the importance of examining different agricultural systems and their geographical distributions into account, through a global lens when assessing the impact of adaptation strategies to drought.