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Flood in mountainous communities of Pakistan: how does it shape the livelihood and economic status and government support?

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Abstract

The agriculture sector remains under attack by the consistent flooding events in Pakistan as flooding water is sweeping away crops and livelihood opportunities, thus dragging the already vulnerable communities into poverty. This research has studied the adverse impacts of consistent floods (2010 to 2018) on the rural mountainous agriculture, agrarian occupation, economic system, and rise in poverty in ten districts of Hazara and Malakand divisions, Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan. In total, 1000 self-administered questionnaires were deployed at the household level through judgment sampling studying the flood-affected households. Primary data for the impacts of floods on the livelihood, economic status, and poverty and correlation among them was estimated through three parallel logistic regression equations based on indexes for three separate models for the study variable to describe the flood-induced vulnerability at HH level. The results of the interrelationship of the selected variables declared Malakand division more prone to loss of livelihood, degradation of low-economic status, and increased in poverty due to flooding than Hazara division. It is concluded that floods have curtailed the agricultural livelihood on damaging crop production that has degraded locals’ economic system by reducing household’s income and savings, ending up in borrowing of money and leading to debt due to non-repayment. Households’ vulnerability has increased due to increased poverty as being more exposed to natural disasters. It calls for government intervention to safeguard poor mountainous communities of Pakistan through financial help, seeds, livestock, and technical help in times of disaster.

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Data Availability

All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this article.

Notes

  1. A household (HH), here constitute, all family members residing within “one house boundary,” i.e., house and its all occupants that share food and residency, utilize combined income and other combined resources to consume. These family members have one head as combined family/house head. Whereas, household size is a relative term that varies between 5–12 (Beaman and Dillon 2012).

  2. It is defined as the assets, the capabilities as well as the activities required for a means of living (Dahlquist et al. 2007).

  3. It is the state of susceptibility to get harmed from contact to stresses and strains linked to environmental and non-environmental disastrous changes, especially in the absence of lack of capacity and capability to react to decrease the disastrous impacts multi-level human interactions with system (e.g., social system, political system.) determine human vulnerability, i.e., vulnerability = exposure + susceptibility – resilience (Adger 2006).

    Or Vulnerability = sensitivity to stress × probability of exposure to stress.

    State relative to threshold.

  4. The houses and population are declared “vulnerable” based on their helplessness and low social status and poor economic standing, coupled with their poor human and political conditions that increases their exposure to flooding (Twigg 2004). So, laying on the banks of water channels and being affected continuously across socio-economic, human, and political domains due to flooding events are the criteria used to select households as “vulnerable” in the study divisions.

  5. Hazara division is situated at 32.7962° N, 74.2840° E with the total area of 18,013 km2.

  6. Malakand division is situated at 35° 30′ 0″ N, 72° 0′ 0″ E with an area of 29,800 km2.

  7. Self-administration means that the questionnaires were self-distributed and collected by the researchers themselves with the help of volunteers. In cases where the respondents were illiterate the researchers had asked the questions and recording (ticked) the responses accordingly. This self-administration ensured 100% accuracy in data collection. No questionnaire was discarded. Thus, self-administration helped to save resources, which otherwise the location of villages and houses in remote far-flung areas could had increase the financial costs and it could had been more time consuming.

  8. As the survey was conducted at household level, therefore all the household representatives (at the time of survey in case of Hazara division) were male.

  9. The odds value = 2.838 > 1 shows that floods increases as livelihood index increases as follows: floods (2383).

    $$=\frac{2383}{1000}=\frac{No. of H{H}^{^{\prime}}s Livelihood at level e1}{No. of H{H}^{^{\prime}}s livelihood at 1-e1}$$

  10. The odds ratio = 0.441 is interpreted as follows: floods (441) = \(\frac{441}{1000}\)  = \(\frac{No. of H{H}^{^{\prime}}s Livelihood at level e1}{No. of H{H}^{^{\prime}}s livelihood at 1-e1}\)

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Funding

The authors owe a debt of gratitude and thanks also to the Higher Education Commission (HEC), Government of Pakistan, for the financial support under Thematic Research Grant Program (TRGP): Ref: 1-HEC/HRD/HAS/SS/2017/17369.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Development Studies, School of Social Sciences and Humanities (S3H), National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Sector H-12, Islamabad, Pakistan

    Umer Khayyam & Ramsha Munir

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  1. Umer Khayyam
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Contributions

Conceptualization: Umer Khayyam, methodology: Umer Khayyam and Ramsha Munir; formal analysis, investigation, writing—original draft preparation, review and editing: Umer Khayyam Ramsha Munir; funding acquisition and supervision: Umer Khayyam. Both the authors have agreed to its publication in this journal.

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Correspondence to Umer Khayyam.

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Appendix

Appendix

Questionnaire_Hazara & Malakand Research Study_2017

This survey is to analyze the adverse effects of flooding in Hazara and Malakand Divisions of KPK, Pakistan. All the data and measurements obtained from this research study will be stored confidentially and anonymous from external reviewers.

Thank you for your time (max.20 min) to complete the questionnaire.

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Khayyam, U., Munir, R. Flood in mountainous communities of Pakistan: how does it shape the livelihood and economic status and government support?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 40921–40940 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-18709-x

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