Socio-economic impact on vulnerability of tropical forests of Eastern Ghats using hybrid modelling

Abstract

Forest vulnerability assessment has been proven paramount from regional to global scale in order to determine the natural as well as socio-economic pressure exerted on the ecosystem. The hybrid of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) with Weighted Overlay Modelling (WOM) has proven to be effective and has yielded desirable results with greater accuracies. In AHP, The highest weights were assigned to forest edge (DFE) (0.27) followed by roads (DRo) (0.22), shifting cultivation (0.11) and settlements (0.11) whereas the parameters river, slope, elevation and Normalized Differential Vegetation Index (NDVI) were given lower priority values of 0.09, 0.08, 0.08 and 0.04, respectively. Among the total of 8856 number of grids of 1 km2 dimension, 1126 grids (12.71%) are under very high vulnerability and the high and medium vulnerability classes share 682 (7.70%) and 3 grids (0.03%), respectively of the total geographic area of the district. The Anthropogenic Disturbance Index (ADI) ranged from 4.6 to 61.5 and 1429.57 km2 forest area was common between the overall forest vulnerability and anthropogenically vulnerability indicating that forest vulnerability is occurring mostly due to the socio-economic activities. The causes may be attributed to the operation of two major mines and three major industries and mostly to the shifting cultivation which is one of the major socio-economic practices in the tribal dominated district. The REDD + programmes can be implemented at community levels by strengthening regional forest department and local communities for better management of forest resources through indigenous techniques without compromising the socio-economic and livelihood developments.