I've read numerous papers about socioeconomic vulnerability assessment and I found out that most of the papers focused on natural hazards and disease(such as COVID-19 pandemic). I can't find anything related specifically to water pollution. Therefore, what are the potential parameters/indicators for adaptive capacity for socioeconomic vulnerability assessment of water pollution?
Article Assessment of socioeconomic vulnerability to landslides usin...
Based on the article, the indicators are risk awareness, early warning capacity, regulation control and emergency response.
Article Assessing socio-economic vulnerability to climate change-ind...
In this article, education, access to mobile connection, income, access to water facilities and health awareness camp were as indicators.
Article The Socioeconomic Vulnerability Index: A pragmatic approach ...
However, the indicators used in this article were in demographic domain such as population growth rate, population density and percentage of illiterate households.
I think the biggest challenge is finding a way on how to quantify it. Another obstacle is the availability of socioeconomic data of appropriate geographical coverage.
Muhammad Firdaus
Hello Sir…Interesting question and thought provoking as well.
Economic vulnerability assessment …income, regulation controls, educational support etc. indicators of risk, early awareness programs related to water and water body pollution can be related to the Environment protection funding agencies…(which are controlled by developed countries)… who make blinkered decisions for developing and under developed countries …irrespective of the actual ground situation.
My bit.
Hello Muhammad,
Some of my work is related to water pollution, but not necessarily to adaptive capacity. However, here are some ideas for you to consider in addition to other indicators that you probably already found, those that Viniti already mentioned, and those found in other papers (for example, Article Measuring the dimensions of adaptive capacity: A psychometric approach
):- Degree of pollution (can be based on Maximum Contaminant Levels for different contaminants)
- Distance of water system, community, or household from pollution source. (could be used as proxy of degree of contamination)
- Distance of water system, community, or household to a clean source of water (to asses possibility of brining water from a nearby clean source)
- Precipitation (to consider rainwater capture)
- Access to sanitation services
- Available groundwater resources
Viniti Gupta
I'm planning on using an indicator-based approach. I still can't figure out how to rank these indicators based on their relative importance(Especially how to construct criteria for each indicators). Questionnaire survey is kind of commonly used aside from statistical method such as principal component analysis (PCA). So the agencies should be my questionnaire samples?
Examples of adaptive capacity indicators include: Risk awareness, emergency response(How well prepared the stakeholders are when the event strikes) & regulation control(The effectiveness of the laws & policies in preventing pollutions from happening)
You must have identified the water bodies which you are taking as a case studies…..so
1. Natural resources in that area and
2. Economic activities occuring in that area … must have already been taken into account by you..?
The economic activities in the study area are mostly industrial activities. The main cause of water pollution in the study is discharge of industrial effluent (Mostly from illegal industrial plants). Aquaculture and sand mining are also another causes of water pollution in the study area.
Just a suggestion
Use the Cause and Effect logic to create a flow chart of events and then prioritise your indicators
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