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

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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.

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Notes

  1. International Disaster Database EM-DAT, Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters.

  2. Glacial run is a phenomenon involving flash floods that occur when the melting or breaking off of glacial ice releases torrents of water that were previously dammed. These are usually glacial lakes that have been prevented from escaping by a glacier that are suddenly released when the ice becomes thinner.

  3. A union council is an elected local government body headed by a Nazim (equivalent to a mayor).

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Acknowledgements

This study is part of a Ph.D. research at the College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agricultural University, Beijing, China. This Ph.D. research is made possible by the sponsorship of the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC). We thank to the Department of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Provincial Disaster Management Authority (KP-PDMA) and local households representatives and enumerators for their effective support and coordination in organizing and conducting successful household interviews during February and June 2016. We are very thankful to Nicholas Parrott for his contribution to proofreading and editing of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agriculture University, No. 17 Qing Hua Dong Lu, Haidian District, Beijing, 100083, People’s Republic of China

    Ashfaq Ahmad Shah, Jingzhong Ye & Syed Muhammad Amir

  2. Center for Climate Research and Development (CCRD), COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Park Road, Chak Shahzad Islamabad, Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan

    Muhammad Abid

  3. Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing for Agri-Hazards, Centre for Remote Sensing & GIS China Agricultural University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China

    Jahangir Khan

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  1. Ashfaq Ahmad Shah
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Correspondence to Ashfaq Ahmad Shah.

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Shah, A.A., Ye, J., Abid, M. et al. Flood hazards: household vulnerability and resilience in disaster-prone districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan. Nat Hazards 93, 147–165 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-018-3293-0

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