Objectives Components of vulnerability in urban context

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