Flood hazards: household vulnerability and resilience in disaster-prone districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan

Ashfaq Ahmad Shah (), Jingzhong Ye (), Muhammad Abid (), Jahangir Khan () and Syed Muhammad Amir ()
Additional contact information
Ashfaq Ahmad Shah: China Agriculture University
Jingzhong Ye: China Agriculture University
Muhammad Abid: Center for Climate Research and Development (CCRD), COMSATS Institute of Information Technology
Jahangir Khan: Centre for Remote Sensing & GIS China Agricultural University
Syed Muhammad Amir: China Agriculture University

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2018, vol. 93, issue 1, No 7, 147-165

Abstract: Abstract Pakistan is alarmingly exposed and vulnerable to flood disasters as a result of rapid urbanization that has not taken into account the threats posed by climate change. The devastating impacts of floods and other natural disasters put extra pressure on the country’s budget and has driven the country’s leadership to adopt a proactive approach instead of traditional, aid-based, approach, one that encourages the inclusion of disaster risk reduction measures within local disaster management policies. This research elaborates household vulnerability and resilience to flood disaster within two districts within Pakistan. It uses a dataset of 600 households collected through face-to-face interviews from two districts within the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that were severely affected by the 2010 flood and data from the Directorate of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Provincial Disaster Management Authority. In a second step, we assigned weights to the selected variables for vulnerability (exposure, susceptibility and adaptive capacity) and resilience (with social, physical, economic, and institutional components) and used a subjective method (based on expert judgment) to weight these. The survey findings revealed that both study areas were highly vulnerable and had low resilience to flood disasters. The study findings indicated that community households in the flood-prone areas of Nowshera district were more vulnerable and less resilient than those in Charsadda, with a higher composite vulnerability index scoring and a lower composite resilience index score. This study shows that provincial and local disaster management authorities can play a vital role in reducing vulnerability and that more efforts are required to strengthen social, physical, economic, and institutional resilience through capacity-building training, preparedness, and awareness building about preventing and mitigating flood damage.

Keywords: Climate change; Flood disaster; Vulnerability and resilience; Indices; Disaster risk reduction; Khyber Pakhtunkhwa; Pakistan (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11069-018-3293-0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:93:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s11069-018-3293-0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-018-3293-0

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().