Unravelling the association between the impact of natural hazards and household poverty
Evidence from the Indian Sundarban delta
Abstract
Coastal regions have long been settled by humans due to their abundant resources for livelihoods, including agriculture, transportation, and rich biodiversity. However, natural and anthropogenic factors, such as climate change and sea-level rise, and land subsidence, population pressure, developmental activities, pose threats to coastal sustainability. Natural hazards, such as fluvial or coastal floods, impact poorer and more vulnerable communities greater than more affluent communities. Quantitative assessments of how natural hazards affect vulnerable communities in deltaic regions are still limited, hampering the design of effective management strategies to increase household and community resilience.
Drawing from Driving Forces-Pressure-State-Impact-Response, the authors quantify the associations between household poverty and the likelihood of material and human loss following a natural hazard using new survey data from 783 households within Indian Sundarban Delta community.
This research was supported by the Ecosystem Services for Poverty Alleviation (ESPA) programme
Citation
Hajra, R., Szabo, S., Tessler, Z., Ghosh, T., Matthews, Z., Foufoula-Georgiou, E., (2017) Unravelling the association between the impact of natural hazards and household poverty: evidence from the Indian Sundarban delta, Sustainability Science, vol.12, issue7, pp.453-464,