Citation

Islam A, Ghosh S. Appl. Spat. Anal. Policy 2022; 15(1): 1-47.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1007/s12061-021-09384-5

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Riverine flood, a common natural hazard in the rarh plains of India, induces frequent changes in the landscape morphology and societal transformations. Therefore, a community-based risk assessment is attempted in the context of riverine floods in the rarh plains with special reference to the Mayurakshi River Basin based on the nature of flood hazard and community vulnerability. Flood hazard is measured in terms of flood frequency, depth and durations while the community vulnerability is assessed using its physical, economic, demographic and social-infrastructural components. The present study is executed over a statistically significant sample size of 2382 households across the 43 villages spread in 5 community development (C.D.) blocks. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been applied for the risk assessment and the relative importance index has been used to quantify the community behaviour. The results portray that the C.D. blocks such as Kandi having the maximum flood magnitude depicts a strong negative relation (R2 = 0.63) with economic vulnerability while the lesser flood-prone C.D. blocks such as Nabagram have strong positive relation (R2 = 0.66) indicating a typical societal transformation coevolved with flood hazards. The ANOVA shows that the religion-based community risk differs significantly in terms of economic and social-infrastructural vulnerability while income-based community risk differs for hazard propensity and total vulnerability. The main driving force leading to this difference in vulnerability and risk is the agricultural distress intensifying the labour migration that brings higher per capita income through foreign remittances. Besides, community behaviour and different adaptation strategies also play important roles in community risk.

Language: en

Keywords

Agricultural distress; Community behaviour; Community vulnerability; Remittances; Risk analysis