Drought: An External Agri-project Risk Analysis for Thabana Morena Constituency Number 52, Mafeteng, Lesotho

Climate change has proven to increase the odds of worsening drought events around the globe, resulting in adverse effects on society, economy and environment. The current study aimed at characterising drought events in the study area in order to alert responsible government department and all other relevant authorities for proactive response before it is too late. The researcher collected precipitation datasets from NASA data portal alongside the main Thabana Morena road. For quality control, both homogeneity and stationarity test were conducted. Prior to this, outliers were detected and replace back by Expectation Maximum algorithm aided by SPSS. Three computer programmes were used in this study, namely; DMAP, XLSTAT and PAST3. Drought was quantified on two temporal time scales to pick up both agricultural and hydrological drought episodes. Major results indicated most stations having homogenous precipitation datasets and as such only two distant stations (Ha Thakanyane and Ramarothole) were used in further analysis. Ha Thakanyane and Ramarothole depicted constant and statistically increasing severe drought conditions on both temporal scales over 38 years respectively. The situation warrants sustainable off-agricultural interventional measures by the government and all relevant stakeholders to protect environment and human lives that are dependent on rainfed agriculture for livelihood.