A local scale flood vulnerability assessment in the flood-prone area of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

This study focuses on developing and adopting best management practices to address flood vulnerability issues. One of the commonly used methods for evaluating flood vulnerability is empirical investigation using composite indicators. The objectives of the current study are therefore twofold. On the one hand, it demonstrated in a comprehensive step-by-step approach to develop flood vulnerability composite indicator taking into account the broad range of stakeholders and the reliability of research. On the other hand, the flood vulnerability profile of the selected communities is being developed. The study covers central Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Pakistan, a highly flood-prone area of the province. The lives and assets of local communities are deeply vulnerable, attributed to the recurrence of seasonal floods. Households’ survey was conducted in the selected communities using random sampling. The composite indicators of flood vulnerability were developed as the relative measure of flood vulnerability across the selected communities. A robustness check was carried out using convenient techniques to address the problem of uncertainty. For such a purpose, the composite indicators of flood vulnerability were developed through various data rescaling, weighting, and aggregation schemes. The relative levels of flood vulnerability are identified across the selected communities, and the findings are illustrated by colored matrices.

The study identifies different factors as being responsible for the relative vulnerability of various communities. The approach is applied to the selected food-prone villages of Peshawar Vale, in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. It was noticed that the village of Agra is comparatively highly vulnerable to fooding followed by Dheri Zardad, B.S. Ismail, Sukkar, Haji Zai, Mohib Banda, and Pashtun Garhi. It has been discovered, however, that the Dheri Zardad can take over ranked frst under various methodological assumptions, which need further investigation. Up-scaling results at the district level indicated that households in the communities residing in the Charsadda district were found to be relatively highly vulnerable to fooding compared to the Nowshera district using current dataset. From District Charsadda and Nowshera, it implies the selected communities of these districts as only some parts of these districts are vulnerable to fooding relative to their overall geographical areas. The study emphasizes to encourage the new-comers from human-geography or related felds to build composite indicators for foods, droughts, or related hazards in a fairly simple and methodologically defensible way that is demonstrated in the current study in great detail.