ICBR Conference Paper Abstract

Climate Change is a significant threat to India and its coastal communities. This increased threat
needs to be addressed by applying long term and permanent solutions. Unfortunately, current
response tends to be short term and temporary, not building long-term and permanent solutions. For
example, International organizations and governments are focusing more on building physical
infrastructures like levees and less on the social capital that is the key to building resilient
communities capable of managing flooding. There is a significant gap in current knowledge
concerning the potential of social capital in the resiliency phase of climate induced disasters in India.
At the same time, many case studies explicitly demonstrate that those communities which have strong
social capita, performs better in rehabilitation process through the collective actions. If communities
understand the risk of climate change, then they will perceive the potential hazard and will start to
come together to adapt the mitigation strategies. This study aims to test the hypothesis, “Coastal
community’s climate change risk perception and social capital leads to improved Societal Resilience”
through examining 3 coastal communities from 4 cities in India. It requires assessing risk perception
and social capital indicators of coastal communities. For this, household vulnerability, the community
profile, and structure of community will be studied and connected with each other. This will be done
by selecting appropriate indicators and analysing them using common factor analysis and principal
component analysis. The study aims to help to develop a community-tailored policy to develop their
resilience also the research will contribute to develop multi-actor climate change response strategies.