Flood-induced Loss and Damage to Textile Industry in Surat City, India

Abstract

Indian coastal cities are susceptible to climate-induced disasters, like cyclonic storms, floods and sea-level rise, all while existing urbanization challenges amplify vulnerability. Enhancing a city's resilience capacity is a pertinent issue when there are plans to redevelop several of India's cities into 'climate-smart'-this needs a comprehensive city-wide loss and damage assessment. For empirical purposes, this study attempts a loss and damage assessment of the textile industry in Surat city, western India to floods. The advantage is that it estimates indirect loss and damage and also considers compensation as a positive externalitymostly ignored by disaster assessment agencies. The results suggest that: (a) an average of 49 days was required to come back to normalcy when the flood water remained for 4 days; (b) most of the labourers out-migrated during post-flood scenario, and hence, shortage of labour was reported as major issue; (c) the mean loss and damage was approximately `1.51 million, around 23 per cent of an industry's total profit, with `1 million indirect losses, which reinforces it to be factored into the disaster's impact cost assessment and (d) owners' risk perception about potential impacts of future floods is moderate, which may lead to a lack of investment in planned adaptation. Such type of study provides insights into the city's resilience capacity to future disasters, urging to conduct such analysis across the Indian cities.

Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises, Organizational Resilience Capacity and Flash Floods: Insights from a Literature Review

“…By examining SMEs that have previous experience with flash floods, in-depth knowledge can be obtained on the effectiveness of strategies and measures employed in order to reduce impacts of and contribute to the recovery process. While several recent studies have sought to analyze impacts and factors associated with the recovery from floods and other EWEs [40,41,43,93,94], more empirical research is required in order to gain a better understanding of particular measures and actions that facilitate SMEs to robustly address shortand long-term flood impacts. Such knowledge, which can also be gained through the application of composite firm-level indicators assessing organizational, behavioral and contextual factors of the resilience capacity level, can serve as a basis for developing sets of actionable guidelines of good practices that may be adjusted to individual needs and adopted by SMEs in order to strengthen their resilience capacity.…”

Inclusion in urban environmental governance of small and intermediary cities of the global South

“…Karanth and Archer (2014) estimate that a 1-metre sea level rise could submerge nearly 40% of the city land. Despite these risks, an official integrated assessment of losses and damages is yet to be conducted in the city (Bahinipati et al, 2017 Actors: The Surat Municipal Corporation (SMC), the regional business association Southern Gujarat Chamber of Commerce and Industries (SGCCI), academics, and experts drafted the CRS. TARU, a private advisory group provided risk assessments.…”

“…The plague epidemic of 1994 (Chu, 2016) and the 2006 flood (Bahinipati et al, 2017) increased the awareness of the city on environmental and public health issues and led to active participation. The SGCCI had an important say in city planning and an interest to prevent future capital losses.…”

Are Micro-, Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises Willing to Contribute to Collective Flood Risk Reduction? Scenario-Based Field Experiments from Jakarta and Semarang, Indonesia

“…Regarding flood impacts, MSMEs often belong to the most affected firms (Bahinipati, Rajasekar, Acharya, & Patel, 2017; D. Marks & Thomalla, 2017).…”