Abstract
Agricultural damage due to floods in the Indus basin’s fertile land has been the most damaging natural disaster in Pakistan so far. Earthen dikes are protecting the vast areas of the floodplain from regular flooding. However, the floodplain is attractive to farmers due to its fertility and experiences regular crop production within and out of the dike area. This paper evaluates the flood risk in a floodplain of the Chenab river in Pakistan and recommends land-use changes to reduce the flood risk for crops and associated settlements within the study area. The objective of the land-use change is not just to reduce flood losses but also to increase the overall benefits of the floodplain in terms of its Economic Rent (ER). This preliminary study analyses the economic impacts of the risk-based land-use improvements on existing floodplain land uses. Expected Annual Damage (EAD) maps were developed using hydrodynamic models and GIS data. The developed model identified the areas where maize can be economically more productive compared to rice under flood conditions. Promising results were obtained for the settlement relocations. It was also observed that the infra-structure, running parallel to the river, plays a significant role in curtailing the extent of floods. The results show that a combination of structural and non-structural measures proves more effective. The study also recommends the inclusion of social and environmental damages as well as other types of non-structural measures to develop the most effective flood management strategy.
Highlights
Floods have long been a natural phenomenon that triggers the largest loss of human life and economic harm worldwide [1]
Based on the static nature and inability to cope with the changing conditions of the rivers, catchments, and floodplains of US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)’s hydro-economic model, Tariq et al recommend using a GIS-based hydrodynamic model to account for any variation in river flow and floodplain [17,81,96]
A further that the recommended zone, as for wellboth as the high-risk area, areas lie in Figure 11 shows theagricultural profit distributions crops, the area that is inundated under a
Summary
Floods have long been a natural phenomenon that triggers the largest loss of human life and economic harm worldwide [1]. They are attracted to settle in floodplains due to land resource availability at lower costs [27,28,29]. When they are flooded frequently, it is often possible that people living in floodplains could become poorer [30,31,32]. The objective of the proposed floodplain zoning is to “demonstrate the land-use adaptations gains in a floodplain in terms of overall agricultural land-use profit, instead of just flood loss reduction”
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