Climate Vulnerability Index for Water at the Household Level in Slums of Delhi

Resumé

The requirements of water are continuously increasing due to demographic, technological, socio-economic changes and climate change. Urbanization is a global trend, especially in developing countries. This will have serious implications on the health of people owing to the close linkages between water and sanitation. It is therefore very important to monitor the developments in the water sector. We used a ‘Climate Vulnerability Index for water at the household level’ (CVI-WH), which links physical availability of water to socio-economic drivers of human development, to quantify the vulnerability of slum families to climate linked water stresses. The study was conducted in five major zones of Delhi, a city with 18.7% slum population. The six key components of CVI-WH are the overall availability of water resources, access to safe drinking water and sanitation, consumption of water at the domestic level, in industry and agriculture; capacity of people to manage water, state of environment and the climatic stresses faced in the region. CVI-WH values ranged from zero (least vulnerability) to one (highest vulnerability). The results showed that the slums were highly vulnerable to climate mediated water stresses as evident by the high CVI-WH values ranging between 0.62 and 0.67 across the zones (higher the value, greater the vulnerability) owing to limited human development, poor access to water resources for domestic consumption, very limited use of water and a dismal state of environment. By comparison, Delhi as a whole faced much lower level of vulnerability with its CVI-WH value at 0.37. It is projected that if the urban poor of Delhi, a state with overall high level of development, are so vulnerable to water and climatic stresses, the condition of other 49,000 slums in India would be much worse. Keywords: Vulnerability, urban population, environmental, statistics, health, socio-economic changes.