Poverty index as a tool for adaptation intervention to climate change in northeast India

Abstract

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007) reports that the number of extreme precipitation and temperature events in India are projected to increase in the short term. The negative effects of this on rural populations in India may include crop and livestock loss, livelihood risk, health and sanitation disruptions and shelter risk. Overseas Development Assistance, in the form of aid, will help rural communities to counter these impacts; several development agencies already require that the adaptation to climate change risks be included as project activities in the aid programme. However, it is often difficult to accurately target development aid in developing countries due to uneven and cluster-like development of areas. To help counter this problem, we developed a poverty index intended to help prioritize development aid towards communities at risk, in order of need. The district-wise poverty index was created for seven states of northeast India, a region with highly uneven development, and has been developed from data available from the North-East Data Bank (DoNER). The indicators were selected to adequately represent the poverty of the people as well as to act as a prioritizing mechanism in a data scarce region. The inclusion of a Gini coefficient of land distribution is new to poverty indexes, and helps to capture the pattern of highly unequal land distribution in northeast India, which in turn affects the distribution of income. Although primarily developed for northeast India, the index can be used in other developing countries with imbalances in regional development. If the biophysical factors affecting vulnerability are known, this index can be used in a weighted combination with vulnerability.