Assessment of Human Vulnerability and Risk of Flood Hazards in Orissa, India

Abstract

Odissa, which is one of the eastern coastal states of India, is affected by frequently recurring flood hazards, many of which have turned out to be disastrous. These floods have often brought large-scale human casualties as well as loss of property for the state. This paper aims to develop and test a set of models to assess the risk of human casualty of the flood hazards at the district level using multivariate linear regression analysis. This method has been used to estimate the human casualty at the district level using the available human casualty and other socioeconomic data from the Government of Odissa, Census of India, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). For this purpose, a number of explanatory variables are used and human casualty has been a response variable. The observed data show that the districts from the coastal regions have high human casualty and population exposure in comparison to other parts of the state. Relative vulnerability is high for the non-coastal districts because the exposed population is less in comparison to human casualties. Model-predicted human casualty shows a nonlinear relationship with recorded human deaths. Results conclude that flood is an extreme event of nature and that its impacts can be predicted with greater accuracy using the models shown in this chapter if the data can be used at microlevel, preferably from the blocks and villages.