University of Twente Student Theses
Households' flood vulnerability assessment in context of climate change
Rahman, Sania (2011) Households' flood vulnerability assessment in context of climate change.
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| Abstract: | A large number of population (3.5 million) are living in slums in Dhaka. In the context of climate change and considering its local context, the flood vulnerability of Dhaka city is very high. This makes a large number of poor people who have little adaptive capacity, to be highly sensitivity to any kind of climatic changes and external stresses in the environment. To understand the consequences of climate change requires knowledge about the interactions of climate change and other stresses and stressors, and about the resilience and vulnerability of human–environment systems that experience them. With this regards three objectives guided this study to assess the flood vulnerability in the local context of Dhaka: To analyses the current vulnerability context, to develop a contextual framework to assess the flood vulnerability and to apply this framework in the selected study areas in Dhaka. Four scientific methods and techniques were used to achieve these objectives: qualitative interviews, statistical analysis from quantitative data (secondary data), spatial multi criteria evaluation techniques and spatial autocorrelations. In order to identify household stress and, the social and bio-physical conditions of human environment systems, in-depth qualitative interviews were carried out. The results reveal that households in Dhaka had different variations of vulnerability depending on their exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Moreover, their vulnerability level was aggravated by a combination of non-climate stresses like human and societal poor slum living conditions they were exposed to. Beside the regular disruptions in the daily life due to flooding factors like income, food intake, health were found to affect their resilience and adaptive capacity. The conceptualization and eventual application of the developed framework in the slums of Dhaka illustrates the importance of understanding and developing place-based methods‟ stress interactions and the characteristics of particular human– environment systems. In conclusion, meaningful analyses of human–environment dynamics require the full participation of local people, their knowledge, perspective, values and behaviour. In this case, vulnerability assessments for communities in Dhaka require in-depth investigations and their active involvement in understanding their human environmental interrelations and their adaptive capacity to climate change. Key words: Vulnerability, Exposure, Sensitivity, Adaptive capacity, SMCE, Flood, Household, Slum. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
| Faculty: | ITC: Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation |
| Programme: | Geoinformation Science and Earth Observation MSc (75014) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/93313 |
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