Abstract
Climate change increases the severity and frequency of water-related hazards in tropical areas, posing significant risks to agriculture as well as the livelihoods of rural communities. The present work advocates an integrated approach to climate-induced risk assessment of agricultural systems in the tropical river basin, specifically the Shilabati River, India. In this work, risk maps were developed using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) framework by integrating hazard, exposure, and vulnerability indices derived from 34 physiographic, climatic, hydrological, edaphic, and socio-economic indicators. The Random Forest (RF) model was employed to predict flood and drought risk across the study area, while RF-based Mean Decrease Gini analysis identified maximum temperature, relative humidity, drought intensity, soil moisture, elevation, population density, land use, Topographic Wetness Index (TWI), proximity to rivers, and lithology as the most influential factors. The results indicate that 17.64% (407 km²) of the agricultural land is flood-prone, affecting approximately 3.63 lakh people, while 27.02% (623 km²) is drought-prone, impacting about 4.56 lakh people. Overall, 45% of the basin falls within the high agricultural risk category, highlighting the acute vulnerability of small and marginal farmers to climate-induced flood and drought hazards. By integrating multiple hazards (i.e., floods and drought) within a unified framework, this research advances beyond previous approaches on single-hazard studies and provides actionable insights for climate-resilient agricultural planning. The findings directly support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG1: No Poverty, SDG2: Zero Hunger, SDG13: Climate Action) by informing targeted adaptation strategies, strengthening food security, and promoting sustainable rural development in hazard-prone areas of the basin.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Ethics approval and consent to participate
The study procedures, including the household survey and use of questionnaire-based data, were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the host institutions and with the Declaration of Helsinki and relevant national regulations. Ethical review and approval for the study were waived by the Research Advisory Committee, Department of Geography, University of Calcutta, as the research involved a non-clinical, questionnaire-based social survey. All participants were informed about the purpose of the study, and verbal informed consent was obtained prior to participation.
Consent for publication
Households and individuals whose images appear in Figs. 1 and 12 were separately informed that their photographs might be used for scientific publications in print and online open-access formats, and they provided explicit informed consent for the publication of these images. All personal identifiers (including names and other potentially identifying information) were removed from the images and accompanying text, and no coloured bars, shapes, or blurring were used to obscure facial features, in line with the journal’s requirements for anonymisation of human images.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Supplementary Material 1 (download DOCX )
Supplementary Material 2 (download DOCX )
Supplementary Material 3 (download PDF )
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Khan, A., Gayen, A., Haque, S.M. et al. Drought and flood risk assessment under the IPCC risk framework in an agriculturally dominated tropical river basin, India.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-67073-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-67073-0
Keywords
- IPCC risk framework
- Drought and flood risk
- Agricultural vulnerability
- Random Forest
- Sustainable rural development
Source: Resources - nature.com
