ACCCRN – City Vulnerability Assessment Report 17
3 VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT
3.1 Objectives
Main objective of the vulnerability assessment is to understand different facets of risks and quantify the components of vulnerability across the study cities to inform adaptation
framework focused on poor and vulnerable urban residents.
3.2 Components of vulnerability in urban context
The Sustainable livelihood framework provides a sound basis for analysis of vulnerability. It defines five capitals which control the livelihoods of poor namely physical, human, financial,
social and natural capitals. While SLF has been extensively for rural conditions, it can be adapted to urban context also, with few modifications.
In the current vulnerability analysis, the SLF has been modified with three most important capacities including income stability, education proxy for human capital and Social
capacity. Similarly the major components were used for defining vulnerability namely: Physical infrastructure access, loans or lack of insurance and location based vulnerability to
resourcesrisks as either floodwater logging in case of Surat or water scarcity in case of Indore. The capacities were separated from vulnerabilities since the former provide the
resilience while the latter increase the impacts during slow and fast onset disasters. The following Table 1 presents the set of indicators used in the study.
The main purpose of using capacity vulnerability indicators were to get a comparative situation across the samples and homogenous polygons using available information from the
household and community level surveys. The following Table 2 presents the survey data sets used to calculate the capacity and vulnerability indices
Table 2: Data sets used for deriving capacity and vulnerability indicators
Indicator Data used
Weightage Comments
Education index
Maximum education in the household and aggregated as
average community level Low weightage up to 10th
standard, then increase rapidly with
10 for
postgraduateprofessional level Higher levels of education
increases capacity to earn and also empowers next
generation to benefit from education
Income Per capita income, ratio of Equal weightage to all three Income stability provides
Table 1: Set of Indicators
Sl. No.
Livelihood capitals
Proxy indicators used Comments
1 Human
Education Capacity
2 Social
Social networks and access Capacity
3 Financial Income stability size of incomes, ratio of stable
incomes to total, dependency ratio Capacity
Loans or lack of insurance Vulnerability
4 Physical Lack of Physical infrastructure access water supply,
sewerage, roads Vulnerability
5 Natural
Water scarcity separate from infrastructurefloods Vulnerability
Source: TARU analysis, 2009
ACCCRN – City Vulnerability Assessment Report 18
stability index stable and unstable incomes, dependency ratio.
factors resilience during disasters,
and ability to invest in adaptation
Social capacity
index Existence of community groups
in settlement, membership of households in these groups,
access to political leadership, benefits derived
Equal weightage to all four factors
Capacity to acces the network critical in group level
resilience
Loan and
insurance vulnerability
index Loans taken, Lack of insurance Equal weightage
Higher the loans, the households will not be able to
invest in adaptations, Lack of insurance results in most of
the damages borne by the household, which can put
back the household finances for long period.
Physical infrastructure
vulnerability drainage, sewerage facilities
within the settlement Scores for different types of
drainage and sewerage Lack of drainage
and sewerage increases risk of
floods Water
scarcity Indore only
Number of water supply sources, Average lpcd
collected, Max distance of source during scarce period,
Water supply frequency, time required for water management
during scarcity Equal weightage
Provides a snapshot of scarcity situation
Water logging flood
vulnerability mainly for
Surat Distance from flood prone
river, depth of inundation during last floods, duration of
inundation Equal weightage
Provides snapshot of floodwaterlogging events
faced by the household as well as possible risk.
Source: TARU analysis, 2009
The details of Scoring is provided in the Annexure B
3.3 Methodology and tools