Populations at risk in flood and drought prone regions of India, 1990-2014: Understanding health and socioeconomic vulnerabilities
Abstract
Flooding and droughts have long plagued India, as have many other extreme-event disasters; and these are expected to increase in frequency and intensity as climate change takes hold. Urbanization may increase population growth in coastal and environmentally at-risk regions, raising the number of people exposed to extreme-event threats. Increasing climate variability along with climate change in the future is likely to introduce new health and socioeconomic vulnerabilities and exacerbate existing inequalities that already exist in these realms.
To explore these issues, we use settlement-level data (i.e., demographic data on towns and villages) for over 600,000 towns and villages from the 2011 Indian Census, supplemented with cluster-level data (i.e., sampling points at the community level) from the 2015-16 Indian Family Health Survey. These demographic data will be spatially overlaid with large-scale flood events (2000-2011) and finer scale events (2012-present), low elevation coastal zones (LECZ) as a predictor coastal elevation for seaward hazards, and modeled drought anomalies. We will estimate population exposed to drought and flood risk and draw out implications for health and socioeconomic vulnerability. Examples of these data layers are shown in Figures 1-4. Census data will be disaggregated to examine risks by key indicators of vulnerability - such as urban or rural residence and housing quality; survey data will allow us to examine access to water and sanitation, health outcomes and access to health facilities, and socioeconomic differences in the populations at risk (education, basic poverty-type measures). By using census and survey data together, we can characterize vulnerabilities of place and individuals exposed to droughts and floods. Initial findings suggest that rural populations face higher risks of exposure to flood events than urban populations, although exposure levels are high for both over the 11-year period. In contrast, urban populations are more likely to reside in medium- to high-risk coastal elevations, where people are threatened by coastal flooding, storm surges, salinity, and water logging. Drought exposure is currently being explored. Results will highlight variation in population subgroups in relation to environmental risk to guide better-targeted disaster preparedness efforts, early warning systems, and adaptation policies.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMGC54A..02B
- Keywords:
-
- 0240 Public health;
- GEOHEALTHDE: 1630 Impacts of global change;
- GLOBAL CHANGEDE: 1803 Anthropogenic effects;
- HYDROLOGYDE: 4329 Sustainable development;
- NATURAL HAZARDS