Abstract
Urban flooding has become a regular phenomenon in many towns and cities in the Asia Pacific region over the past years. Professionals associated with disaster management and climate change are at the forefront of addressing urban flooding. To reduce flood risks, vulnerability and its components must be understood. Vulnerability assessment methods are diverse and complex, with a varied nature of understanding the key terms used in various contexts, and this diversity ultimately reflects on the interpretation of results in research settings. Diverse interpretations and definitions exist in the disaster risk and climate change literature, complicating the process of astute and comprehensive vulnerability assessment. The main purpose of this study was to quantify vulnerability indicators and develop a multidimensional model for vulnerability assessment. Vulnerability is explored through the lens of five dimensions: social, economic, physical/infrastructural, institutional, and attitudinal. This methodology is applied to urban flooding in Pakistan, to verify the proposed model. Three study sites in urban areas with different population sizes, situated in high-risk flood zones in the Punjab Province of Pakistan were selected for empirical investigation. A household survey was conducted, and indices were developed for each dimension based on well-defined indicators. The proposed methodology for vulnerability assessment was tested and found operational. This method can be replicated irrespective of spatial scales and can be modified for other disasters by streamlining hazard specific indicators.
Highlights
Vulnerability assessment is an essential part of both disaster risk reduction and sustainability science (Turner et al 2003; Zhou et al 2015)
In the Rawalpindi community, most of the households living in the floodprone areas were middle income, working as government employees, traders, or daily wage earners
This study argues that vulnerability to urban flooding or any other hazard must not be treated as a single entity, but rather as a composition of social, economic, physical/infrastructural, institutional, and attitudinal factors, and proposes a multidimensional model to measure vulnerability
Summary
Vulnerability assessment is an essential part of both disaster risk reduction and sustainability science (Turner et al 2003; Zhou et al 2015). Vulnerability has emerged as a widely used concept in global environmental change, disaster risk management, and climate change adaptation (Schroter et al 2005; Adger 2006; Polsky et al 2007; Gain et al 2015). Vulnerability assessment entails both the identification and the reduction of the susceptibilities of the exposed elements. Vulnerability is multifaceted and includes diverse components, but there is a lack of an integrated
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