Building resilience to floods in India: human development, income, inequality and forest cover

Enhancing the resilience of disaster-affected communities is always a prime concern for policymakers. Empirical evidence reveals that many socio-economic indicators determine the resilience capacity of an entity. Although several studies in India have investigated the role of socio-economic and generic adaptation measures in reducing impact, there is a lack of studies concerning human development, inequality, and forest cover in reducing vulnerability to extreme events like floods. By considering data related to state-wise losses and damages from floods between 1980 and 2011, we study them in enhancing the resilience capacity of Indian states. Employing Poisson fixed effects with a clustered standard error model, we find: First, human development matters for reducing mortality, but it enhances people affected and houses damaged, and the relationship is expected to have an inverted-U shape for later outcomes. Second, in contrast to the anticipation, variables like inequality are negatively associated with houses damaged and human fatalities, i.e. the latter declines with increasing former. Third, the confounder, like forest cover, is found to be negative for all loss and damage indicators. Fourth, most of these variables are found to be statistically insignificant. Given that deve­loping resilient infrastructure is the need of the hour, this study suggests the inclusion of climate risks in deve­lopment planning to address the adaptation deficit and avoid possible maladaptation.