Publication Details |
| Category | Text Publication |
| Reference Category | Journals |
| DOI | 10.1088/1748-9326/ab6499 |
Licence  |
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| Title (Primary) | A comprehensive India-wide social vulnerability analysis: highlighting its influence on hydro-climatic risk |
| Author | Hari, V.; Karmakar, S.; Ghosh, S.; Murtugudde, R. |
| Source Titel | Environmental Research Letters |
| Year | 2020 |
| Department | CHS |
| Volume | 15 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Page From | art. 014005 |
| Language | englisch |
| Keywords | Data envelopment analysis; India; Mortality; Natural hazards; Risk; Social Vulnerability |
| Abstract | The impacts of hazard events such as extreme rainfall, heat waves, and droughts are substantial and represent an increasing threat over India. Effective adaptations to these hazards require an in-depth understanding of their physical and socioeconomic drivers. While hazard characteristic models have been substantially improved, compelling evidence of the spatio-temporal analysis of social vulnerability (SoV) throughout India are still lacking. Here, we provide the first analysis of the social vulnerability to disasters at a national-scale over past two decades using a robust data envelopment analysis (DEA) framework, which eliminates the subjectivity associated with indicator weighting. An interesting result was that social vulnerability has decreased over past decade, which is primarily due to increase in literacy rate and conversion rate of marginalized groups to the main working population, and decrease in child population due to use of birth control. Contrarily, while analyzing the hydro-climatic hazards over India, we notice an increase in probability of its occurrence over significantly large portions all over India, particularly in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Odisha, North-Eastern states and Telangana. The spatial pattern of increase is surprisingly similar for all three considered hazards, viz. extreme precipitation, heat waves, and drought. Combining the information from SoV and hazards analysis, we further estimate the risk to hydro-climatic extremes. A notable observation was the synchronized increase in hazard and risk in these regions, indicating that hazards are contributing significantly to the increasing risk and not SoV. Further analyses of mortalities induced by different hazards indicate that deaths per billion on a decadal-scale have either decreased or remained constant in recent decades, which suggests that mortality is decreasing despite the increasing risk of hazards over India. This also indicates an enhanced capacity of adaptation, which can be attributed to the decadal decrease in social vulnerability observed in the present study. |
| Persistent UFZ Identifier | https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=22623 |
| Hari, V., Karmakar, S., Ghosh, S., Murtugudde, R. (2020): A comprehensive India-wide social vulnerability analysis: highlighting its influence on hydro-climatic risk Environ. Res. Lett. 15 (1), art. 014005 10.1088/1748-9326/ab6499 |
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