A comparison of performance measures of two livelihood vulnerability indices in the context of recurrent tropical flood hazards

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Natural hazards often pose a considerable amount of social vulnerability which is the function of exposure, sensitivity and adaptation. Livelihood vulnerability assessment (LVA) benefits site-specific resilience building and disaster management. There are two popular indices of LVA – (1) the livelihood vulnerability index (LVI) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) and another method by (2) Hahn et al. (2009). The study intends to reveal the index that is more suitable to address the flood-induced livelihood vulnerability of the rural communities of the Mayurakshi river basin, India. To this end, the nature of exposure, adaptive capacity and sensitivity involving 35 parameters are measured mainly based on the primary data collected from a questionnaire survey executed over 2382 households spreading over 43 villages from five community development (C.D.) blocks. Moreover, the annual flood reports, district census reports, topographical maps, and satellite images are used as secondary data. The result shows that as per Hahn et al.’s LVI, Khargram (LVI- 0.41) is the most vulnerable block while Nabagram (LVI- 0.35) is the least vulnerable block. However, according to IPCC-LVI, Bharatpur-I has the highest LVI (0.02) and Burwan has the lowest LVI (-0.09). It is observed that exposure exhibits a strong positive correlation with IPCC-LVI and adaptive capacity also maintains a similar correlation with Hahn et al.’s LVI. Interestingly, Kandi is the most exposed block (score: 0.59) with a high adaptive capacity (score: 0.47) resulting in its exclusion from the high LVI category of both methods. This comparative performance assessment underscores the significance of the work before the decision-makers in preparing microscale disaster management plans.