Flood vulnerability of rural women – An indicator-based approach

In Kerala, floods are considered as a major and most frequent hazard affecting about 14.8 % of the area and 52 % of the population being vulnerable to flood impacts. There are large differences between men and women in terms of impacts, vulnerabilities, and capacity to adapt to these challenges. Rural women are hard hit by the flood impacts especially due to constraining gender norms and high dependence on agriculture. Hence, the study aims to assess the Flood Vulnerability Index of Rural Women (FVI^RW) for the selected Agro-ecological Units (AEUs) of Kerala, using the three dimensions of vulnerability viz, Adaptive capacity, Sensitivity and Exposure, under which 9 major components and 69 indicators were selected. The study was conducted in Pokkali Land and Kuttanadu AEU and was based on the primary data collected from 200 rural women through personal interviews. The developed FVI^RW value indicated that rural women in both Pokkali Land (0.562) and Kuttanadu (0.551) are highly vulnerable. Probing into the dimensional values showed that Pokkali Land, had higher index value (0.679) for exposure followed by sensitivity dimension (0.671) and adaptive capacity (0.471). In case of Kuttanadu, the exposure dimension had higher value (0.687) followed by sensitivity (0.640) and adaptive capacity (0.464) dimension. In depth analysis in to the components like socio-demographic profile, livelihood strategies, socio-economic assets, water, health, and food indicated the need of urgent interventions at policy level. Hence to improve the current situation, adaptive interventions like schemes to improve the credit borrowing capacity of the women, linking women organizations to credit cooperative institutions, and mitigation interventions like conducting trainings on flood risk management and technology adoption, and insurance on assets loss can be implemented. The FVI^RW developed can also be extended to other prominent flood vulnerable tracts of Kerala and other places with necessary modification.