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 re-develop 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 externality—mostly 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.
Loss and Damage Assessment in the Context of Fire Hazards: A Study on Selected Garment Factories in Bangladesh
