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Flood vulnerability and its influencing factors

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Abstract

Riverine floods are the major weather-related disaster affecting both agriculture production and physical infrastructures in Nepal. Climatic factors aggravated by anthropogenic measures contribute to increasing household-level vulnerability in the country. We use face-to-face interview data collected from 217 households located in the Saptari district of Nepal to understand the household-level vulnerability of farmers impacted by floods. Our model combines variables of household sensitivity, adaptive capacity, and exposure to flooding in an integrated vulnerability index to assess the vulnerability status of households and factors influencing the vulnerabilities. Findings indicate a high vulnerability level of most households stems from higher exposure to flood and lower adaptive capacity. Using the ordinal response model, we find that indicators such as credit access, migration, female-proportion, and perception and familiarity with flood incidences positively influence the vulnerability. However, gender, livestock owned, per capita income, adaptation measures, and distance to water bodies have a negative influence on the vulnerability level. These findings can be used to tailor micro-level policies to minimize the impact of floods in the district. Governmental level effort, such as river control strategy, is needed to minimize the flood risk at a larger scale in the future.

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Notes

  1. Glacial floods and flash floods are other major concerns in Nepal (Bajracharya and Mool 2009; Kattelmann 2003; Thompson et al. 2020) but our study is limited to riverine floods due to their impacts to the Nepal’s economy. The government is often unprepared for one kind of flood, which makes people vulnerable to other kinds of floods or natural disasters such as landslides.

  2. Terai refers to one of the three geographical regions that includes flat, lowland area in southern Nepal with tropical climate (see Fig. 1(a)).

  3. Key informants include Chief District Agriculture Officer, Officer of District Administrative Office, District President of Nepal Red Cross Society, President of Koshi Victims Society, Chief of Tirahut Rural Municipality, District Representative from Rural Reconstruction Nepal, and a retired government agriculture officer.

  4. The range is determined using Stata’s autocode command.

  5. Tirahut Rural Muncipality, Hanumannagar Kankalini Municipality, and Tilathi Koiladi Municipality lie in the southern region. Agnisair Krishnasavaran Rural Municipality and Kanchanrup Municipality lie in the northern region.

  6. “Municipalities” refer to both municipality and rural municipality.

  7. To account for the sensitivity of asking respondents of their caste, we elicit the social class indirectly by providing the list of surnames of the respondents (names were removed to maintain anonymity) to village chiefs.

  8. We use “sneop” command in Stata proposed by Stewart (2004). We select the order of polynomial as K = 3 based on Akaike Information Criteria (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criteria (BIC).

  9. 13 variables were selected from the total 30 variables through stepwise regression.

  10. Chure hills or Siwaliks refers to the lowermost ridge of Himalayan range in southern part of Nepal. These weakly consolidated hills are mostly formed of sedimentary rocks and acts as water reserve for Terai region (MoFSC 2020).

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank Arun KC, Shiva Chandra Dhakal, Tara Prasad Bhusal, Qiankun Zhou, and Imjal Sukupayo for their insights and help at various stages of research. They also acknowledge helpful comments from seminar participants and discussants at the Center for Natural Resources and Economics Policy (CNREP) 2019 and Southern Agricultural Economics Association (SAEA) 2019 meetings.

Funding

This study was funded by the Nepal Agricultural Research and Development Fund (NARDF) under Thesis Grant Agreement-2018. Paudel’s time on this paper was supported by the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture grant #94382 and #94483.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Santosh Pathak

  2. Department of Agricultural Economics, Postgraduate Program, Institute of Agriculture and Animal Science, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal

    Santosh Pathak, Hari Krishna Panta & Thaneshwar Bhandari

  3. Gilbert Durbin Endowed Professor, Department of Agricultural Economics and Agribusiness, Louisiana State University (LSU), LSU Agricultural Center, Baton Rouge, LA, 70803, USA

    Krishna P. Paudel

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  1. Santosh Pathak
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Pathak, S., Panta, H.K., Bhandari, T. et al. Flood vulnerability and its influencing factors. Nat Hazards 104, 2175–2196 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04267-3

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