Abstract:With its wheat production accounting for about 60 percent of the national total, North China is one of the most important grain-producing areas in China. The wheat production in this region directly determines the import and export of wheat of China and is potentially associated with the overall development of agriculture in China. However, suffering the longest and the most severe drought almost every year due to the interannual variability of monsoon climate, this region possesses the largest drought-hit area in China. Therefore, drought risk classification over this region is of particular significance. Generally, disaster risk assessment and zoning play a key role in risk management and disaster emergency response. In North China, drought is one of the most serious agro-meteorological disasters that constrain the winter wheat yield. Considering both natural and social attributes of the natural disaster risk, six indices are selected for the risk assessment in this research. They include the intensity of drought, the frequency of drought occurrences based on wheat drought index anomaly, the frequency of drought occurrences based on yield losses, disaster variation coefficient of yield losses, regional agricultural production level of winter wheat, and the index of disaster resistance. It is well known that in multivariate analysis, ordination is a complementary method in data clustering and is used mainly in exploratory data analysis. By using the most common Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA) ordination method, it is found that there are relationships between different risk assessment indices and they are correlated with the relative meteorological yields. Based on the findings, two risk indices are constructed for two situations with and without defensive responses to drought. Comparison results obtained from these two indices indicate that both the temporal and spatial distributions of the drought risk with defensive responses to drought is quite different from that without defensive responses to drought in the North China Plains, suggesting that the level of the disaster mitigation and risk management plays a great role in the winter wheat production under the current farming practice conditions. Finally, an integrated regionalization for the drought risk of the winter wheat in the North China Plains is successfully carried out using the fuzzy clustering method through the analysis of the decreasing rate of the crop yields in the famine year and risk indices involving disaster resistance as the clustering standards.