Environmental Challenges (Aug 2021)
A survey on households’ resilience to landslide hazard in Murree hills of Pakistan
Abstract
Landslides frequently occur in the Himalayan part and often cause loss to human life, houses and other infrastructure. Community resilience is extensively employed in studying hazards and disasters. In this paper, we tried to assess resilience of households in a landslide affected area of Pakistan. Indicators and their concerned variables regarding resilience to landslides were identified through literature and then the primary data about these indicators were collected through questionnaire survey from 200 randomly selected households. Overall landslides resilience is the cumulative effect of the four constituent indicators including social, economic, institutional and physical. Each constituent indicator comprised of relevant variables. Weights were assigned to the selected variables using subjective assessment method based on a percentage scale ranging from 01. A variable resilience index was first calculated for each variable and then indices for each of the four constituent indicators were calculated using average method. Finally, the composite resilience index was also calculated from the values of the constituent indicators using average method. The analysis revealed low values of resilience for rural fringe as compared to urban fringe and inner city. This research stresses the need to enhance the physical, institutional, economic and social indicators of the households. The study recommends that disaster management authorities should play their role for enhancing resilience of the households through appropriate measures in this landslide prone area of Pakistan.
