Livelihood vulnerability index analysis: An approach to study vulnerability in the context of Bihar

Abstract

Vulnerability is the capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of natural disasters. Floods add to the distressed conditions of the poor and vulnerable people in Bihar. Floods have a different impact on households depending on differences in their livelihood choices. Therefore, in order to identify the variability in vulnerability of affected households, the livelihood vulnerability index (LVI) of Hahn, Riederer and Foster was modified according to the context of the study area. The LVI aims to identify sources and forms of vulnerability that are specific to the context in order to design context-specific resilience measures. However, vulnerability and resilience are not interdependent but discrete entities. The study was conducted in the seven blocks of Bhagalpur district in the state of Bihar. Naugachia was found to be the least vulnerable because of better access to basic amenities and livelihood strategies, whilst Kharik was found to be highly vulnerable in respect to other blocks because of high sensitivity and less adaptive strategy. The study also revealed that better access to resources does not necessarily mean that households are adopting resilience measures because of apathetic or indifferent attitudes.

Impact of Climatic and Non-climatic Factors on Sustainable Livelihood Security in Gujarat State of India: A Statistical Exploration

“…The value of estimated SI lies between 0-1 for each indicator [15,25,37,[40][41][42]. If the value of an indicator (e.g., population density, population growth rate, urbanization, fertilizer consumption/hectare land, infant mortality rate) is negatively associated with SLS [8] then SI is estimated using below formula [26]: …”

“…High population density is caused to increase the additional climate vulnerability and high pressure on agricultural [8,15,18,26,34,36,39,40,[43][44][45]. It also increases additional pressure on ecological variables.…”

“…High population growth requires more natural resource to sustain basic livelihood (e.g., food, land, transport, water, air) of peoples [8,11,13,15,18,26,39,40,44,45]. It also increases GHGs emission in the atmosphere, thus it is significant cause to increase climate change.…”

“…Forest area is an important factor to absorb CO2 emission from human and economic activities and it mitigates the negative impact of climate change in agricultural and other production activities [5,8,13,15,18,25,26,35,36,39,40,43,45]. Forest area also provides the livelihood opportunity in term of hunting, wood, timber, other [1].…”

“…Capability approach adopted by many research organizations to assess the situation of livelihood security of peoples [12]. Livelihood assets are categorized into natural, physical, economic or financial, human and social capital [2,3,[13][14][15]. Natural capital comprises soil, forest area, irrigated area, genetic resource, hydrological cycle and water resource.…”