Good morning everyone. WHAT AM I TALKING ABOUT TODAY?

RESEARCH QUESTION

AIM AND OBJECTIVE

5 – My spatial scope is limited to the administrative boundary of Namkhana community

development block, which is one of the 19 CD blocks of the Indian Sundarban Biosphere. The area
has high exposure to natural hazards like cyclones, storm surges and sea level rise but also has
strengths of good regional connectivity to Kolkata via the NH12, established weekend getaways like
Bakkhali and 3 reserved forests. Namkhana also abuts the Sagar Island and Digha Sankharpur ICZMP
zone.

5 – So, to this area of problems and possibilities, I undertook a two-week long survey in end October
2021, when the experience of Cyclone Yash was still fresh in peoples’ minds. The surveys comprised
of expert opinion surveys from different professionals and academicians to collect data and weights
for different subindices and perception about development in the area. I will inform about the
relevant findings in later slides.

I also did a household survey of 381 households to collect information regarding their livelihood,
housing and services, education levels, aspirations and cyclone awareness and mitigation. Tourism
surveys of 10 ecotourism establishments in Mousuni Island, 60 tourists across Namkhana and
Mousuni Island, fishermen survey of 2 fishermen associations and farmers surveys were conducted
to understand impact of climate-induced risk on specific professions.

Coming to risk evaluation, the process I followed based on multiple research papers was selection of
parameters based on context and scale, weightage by experts or surveys, mapping the data spatially,
reclassification of those thematic layers and finally weighted overlay on ArcGIS.

6 – For weightage of the indicators selected from literature review and filtered based on ground
surveys, I used different methods appropriate to the type of data. For hazard and physical
vulnerability weightage, I used AHP to compute mean weights from AHP of different experts. For
social vulnerability weightage, I assigned pair-wise weights into the fuzzy AHP calculator based on
data collected from field surveys. For mitigation capacity, I asked the respondents of the household
survey to rate the effectiveness of mitigation measures on a Likert scale of 1 to 5; then normalised
the scores and computed the average score of each parameter from across all the responses. These
are the final weights.

To find physical vulnerability, I have used 4 thematic layers of elevation, slope, proximity to coastline
and LULC and reclassified them into the following vulnerability classes.

7 - I found the LULC cover using 2021 Sentinel 2 imagery using Maximum Likelihood classification
model using training to testing ratio of 70:30. The kappa accuracy of 85% obtained by testing 120
ground verification points is moderately good. There are majorly 5 land cover classes of mangrove
forests, agricultural fields, barren land and rural settlements.

These are the individual layers which have been superimposed using the Weighted Sum overlay, to
obtain the physical vulnerability map. It can be seen that a large portion of the block lies in
bulnerability class 5 and 4, which can be attributed to its high proximity to coastline and LULC
consisting of built up along the coast.
The indicators for Social Vulnerability are the following. Population density and household density
has been projected for 2021 from the 2011 values using the decadal increase rate of 17% noted in a
World Bank strategy report. The village wise values for agriculture dependent population, literacy
rate, children and female population i.e. the dependent population and kuccha housing has been
obtained from field survey. The weighted social vulnerability shows that villages like Narayanpur,
Kusumtala and Amrabati have maximum vulnerability.

For mitigation capacity, the 5 indicators are cyclone shelter adequacy, proximity to cyclone shelter,
embankment strength, proximity to health infrastructure and coastal vegetation mapped using the
proxy indicator NDVI.

Starting with cyclone shelters, there are 6 MPCS – 3 funded by PMRF and 3 funded by the World
Bank aided ICZMP project. From the household survey, it was found that majority of the population
receives information about the cyclone atleast a day in advance, so mere buffering from the cyclone
shelter wasn’t a good indicator of the mitigation capacity. The maps in the bottom show the
adequacy of the cyclone shelter capacity in relation to the vulnerable population living in kuchha
housing, and the network analysis of cycle drive time isochrones have also been considered as the
villages expressed that they feel hesitant in going to the shelter if it is too far from home.

The usage of schools as an auxillary layer of shelters has been found to hamper education as they
had to cater to the vulnerable population. Thus, the number of shelters or the capacity of schools
have to be increased as a temporary mitigation measure.

For mapping embankment health as a mitigation factor, I collected data from the SDO of Kakdwip
Irrigation Division (under which Namkhana falls) - regarding the material, construction and
performance of the embankments spatially. 60% of the embankments are made of mud, while a
small 12% of the embankments are made of concrete. The vulnerability was computed from the
frequency of damage reported by the villagers, and it was found that Around 22% of the concrete
embankments are damaged while 28% of the mud embankments are damaged. I was surprised to
know the 4 major threats to embankment health – the first being burrowing by ghop and crabs,
which eat the fish particles in the local mud which is used to build the embankments. The second is
saline water which damages both mud and concrete embankments. The sluice gates used to drain
off stormwater during low tide are misused to bring in water during the high tide to create
aquaculture ponds. Last but not the least, the areas under construction are highly vulnerable to
natural hazards, such as was seen in the southern tip of Baliara in Mousuni Island.

All in all, the seawall has proved to be most effective against coastal erosion in risk prone areas, such
as this spot in Kusumtala which has survived Cyclone Amphan in 2020.

The weighted overlay of the above 5 thematic layers gives us the mitigation capacity map, which
shows that inland locations having access to cyclone shelters, low embankment vulnerability and
better access to health infrastructure have higher mitigation capacity.

These three raster layers when plugged into the risk equation using the Raster Calculator tool on
ArcGIS, generated the Risk Map, which shows a couples of prominent risk hotspots.

Ranking the villages in order of descending risk, we find highest risk is faced by Lakshmipur Abad,
Amrabati, Durganagar, Narayanganj, Rajnath Srinath gram, Narayanpur and Baliara. This clustering
based on risk gives us the priority order for phasing interventions in the proposals stage. The
following charts explains the shortcoming and issues of the high risk prone villages.

TAKEAWAYS
CLOSING CONCLUSION

How this contributes to the body of research?