Khaghan and Naran Valley of Pakistan are popular tourist mountainous region and face direct impacts of environmental degradation in past years. The current study aims to map the impacts of tourism on the local community and how it has affected the environmental settings. Mixed method approach was utilized including questionnaire survey; meteorological records, focused group interviews and mapping the land cover changes using satellite imagery. Meteorological data shows anomaly in rainfall patterns and extreme temperature which can be considered as climatic pressures on fragile environment. Spearman’s correlation showed that environmental degradation was linked with increased tourism activities in the region. Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) shows an increasing trend of land degradation by the conversion of forested areas into settlements. Considering the significant magnitude of degradation over the last decade, appropriate and urgent actions are needed to address the growing demand of the tourism sector.
The resilience of the rural household to food insecurity has been assessed in two districts of Tharparkar desert, Sindh-Pakistan. The main aim of the study was to assess the prospects of the local community to cope with droughts. Drought has been the most threatening risk for the study area due to its severe effects on the food, income, health, adaptability of the people, and survival of livestock. The resilience of locals to the serious dry conditions was estimated by using a Resilience Index. The household resilience index from ten latent variables: income and food access, agricultural assets, non-agricultural asset, access to basic services, social safety nets, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, climate change, agricultural practices and technology and enabling institutional environment were calculated. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was conducted for checking the appropriateness of data as a whole and along with ten components of resilience index. Data samples were measured by the KMO Test of Sampling Adequacy (0.512) which indicates that the components used for PCA were relevant as the standard value was greater than equal to 0.5. The results state that overall Tharparkar region was vulnerable due to having more livelihood from natural resource dependency. The availability of the water resources by any community aided their survival even in the worst conditions. Nagarparkar being close to the openly accessible water was comparatively more resilient then Islamkot which had no water in close proximity. Evitable attention is needed by the policy makers to tackle food insecurity of local community.
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