Localized Floods, Poverty and Food Security: Empirical Evidence from Rural Pakistan

Abstract

National level floods affect large sections of the population, and in turn, receive attention from the government and international agencies. Localized natural disasters, including localized floods, do not get the attention of the government and policymakers because their impact is felt within limited geographical areas, despite the fact that these disasters severely affect the livelihood of rural communities. This study examines the impact of localized floods on the livelihood of farmers in Pakistan using a cross-sectional data set collected from 812 households. The empirical results show that localized floods severely affect rural livelihoods, and affected households have lowered cereal crop yields, less income, and reduced food security levels. Farmers adopt a number of strategies, including crop and livestock insurance, bund-making, land-leveling, and tree planting, to combat the impact of localized floods. Among all these mitigating strategies, the tree plantation is ranked as the best mitigating strategy followed by crop and livestock insurance, land leveling, and bund making, respectively. Education, wealth, access to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), extension services, and infrastructure, influence the adoption of measures to mitigate the effect of flood risks. National policy on localized flood risks needs to strengthen local institutions to provide support to families and extension services to train farmers to mitigate the impact of localized floods.

Using space–time scan statistic for studying the effects of COVID-19 in Punjab, Pakistan: a guideline for policy measures in regional agriculture

“…The farmers are playing an important role in sustainability of food security and agriculture in Punjab (Pakistan; Malik et al 2020); they are providing raw material for exports, yet they are facing a great deal of challenges (Latif 2020;Mehmood et al 2021;Din et al 2022). Different reports show that the non-availability of labour may disturb some harvesting activities, mostly in Pakistan where wheat and pulses are to be harvested in the month of April (Ali and Rahut 2020;Khan et al 2020a;Masood et al 2022). In Punjab, cultivated area decreased along with farmers' incomes during lockdown because of COVID-19 (WHO (World Health Organization) 2020; Shahzad et al 2021).…”

Flood hazards and livelihood vulnerability of flood-prone farm-dependent Bait households in Punjab, Pakistan

“…In Pakistan for the most part of flood hazards literature determined the aspect of flood hazards management and assessment (Hashmi et al, 2012;Bahadar et al, 2015;Tariq and Van De Giesen, 2012), flood hazards perception and adaptation strategies , floods causes, consequence and protection measures (Yaqub et al, 2015;Khan, 2011), riverbank erosion and inundation of hazards zone (Khan et al, 2017;Ali and De Boer, 2010), riverbank erosion and protection work (Ashraf and Shakir, 2018;Khan and Ali, 2003), some studies focused the aspect of adaptation level and local mitigation measures about affects of post floods (Abbas et al, 2017;Abid et al, 2016). In Pakistan, limited research specifically firmed the aspect of flood hazards affect of food security and poverty (Ali and Rahut, 2020;Ashraf and Shakir, 2018), flood hazards resilience , flood persuaded vulnerability and risks of health (Shah et al, 2020), and gender based aspect of flood hazards adaptation strategies ).…”

Catastrophic Risks Management via Livelihood Diversification From Flood-prone Areas of Punjab, Pakistan

“…In global scenario, catastrophic risks more specifically the floods, cyclones and droughts are a few significant and consecutive disasters Ali and Rahut, 2020) during the current two decades owing to rising incidence of tremendous climatic events (Field et al, 2012;Alam et al, 2019). Risk exposure, geographical locations and lifestyle choices mostly influences natural disasters (Ahmad et al, 2019) and have no limits of geographical, economic, political, cultural and social (Daniell et al, 2016) boundaries of regions, continents and country (Khan et al, 2013;Teo et al, 2018).…”