Investigating the coping strategies of rural households to the drying of Urmia Lake

The drying of Urmia Lake is one of the environmental crises in Iran that generated a diversity of household coping strategies. This study aimed to investigate the coping strategies of rural households to the drying of Urmia Lake. A multi-stage cluster sampling method was used to select 347 rural households from Shabestar county, Urmia Basin. A comprehensive questionnaire was created that included 36 strategies based on literature and structured following Ghorpade's classification, which grouped coping strategies into natural disasters risk-reduction (prevention), self-insurance and risk-sharing. The findings revealed that the risk-reduction (prevention) and risk-sharing strategies had a rising trend since 2002. Self-insurance strategies increased until 2011 and decreased after that. A correlation was observed between the use of risk-reduction strategies and the household heads' level of education and between the use of self-insurance strategies and cost-sharing strategies, on the one hand, and the household heads' years of occupation, on the other hand.