Impacts of Abrupt Climatic Changes on Flood Susceptibility in Northern
Sindh and Southern Punjab, Pakistan
Abstract
Among all other disasters floods are the most destructive and common
natural hazards. It not only endangers people’s lives, land, and wealth
but also destroys a country’s economy. As a result, identifying
flood-susceptible areas have significant importance for flood risk
management as well as early disaster management plan. The main aim of
this study is to classify flood susceptible areas using a frequency
ratio model. The ten (10) conditioning factors including aspect, profile
curvature, Elevation, slope, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index
NDVI, Normalized Difference Soil Index NDSI, distance from road,
distance from river, land use/land cover LULC, and rainfall were
included. Total 230 flood location points were used to create the flood
inventory map. The data was split into two datasets at random, with 70
percent (161 flood points) being used for preparation and the remaining
30 percent (69 flood points) being used for validation. The flood
vulnerability map was divided into five zones, very low (19.73%), low
(20.37%), moderate (20.37%), high (19.88%), and very high (19.62 %).
District Jacobabad has high susceptible land as compare to other
districts of the study area. This region is highly sensitive and has
very low adaptive capability. Pakistan’s share in Greenhouse gas
emissions is relatively very low, but it is the most affected and
vulnerable country by the impacts of climate change. Finally, the area
under the ROC curve AUC was used to develop the presentation and
prediction score, which yielded satisfactory results of 77.4%. The
findings of this paper would be useful to planners, decision-makers, and
future development programs in Pakistan.