Assessing climate change vulnerability: A village level analysis of the Indian west coast

Abstract

The Indian west coast is under constant threat from climate change-induced hazards. Various social, economic, and infrastructural disparities along the coast cause significant variations in climate vulnerability. Current literature assesses vulnerability either over (1) a large area with poor spatial resolution or (2) a local area with better spatial resolution. The former assessments provide more comprehensive and broad insights into large spatial trends of vulnerability, while the latter provide more accurate and specific inputs needed by the local governments for effective intervention. However, there is a lack of studies that assess vulnerability simultaneously at a high-resolution and over a large geographic area, due to inadequacies in existing methodologies and difficulty in data management and analysis. This is a key gap that we address in our paper. We assess climate vulnerability of the entire Indian west coast at the village level, and propose a novel machine-learning based methodology tailored for high-resolution assessment over large geographic areas. This helped us produce the first high-resolution (i.e. village-level) climate vulnerability map of the entire Indian west coast. We found that the state of Maharashtra has the highest number of vulnerable villages and the state of Kerala has the least number of vulnerable villages. We collate and utilize a large dataset of 112 indicators describing socioeconomic characteristics, infrastructure and availability of financial services, among other aspects, to obtain a comprehensive picture of vulnerability. We analyze geospatial trends and attribute high vulnerability to specific indicators, which will help in effective decision-making at the village level.