LINKING THE SOCIAL ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS FRAMEWORK IN ADVANCING HUMAN SECURITY AND RESILIENCE TO FLOOD HAZARDS IN PAKISTAN

Abstract

For the past couple of decades, flood hazards in Pakistan have been increasing in intensity, frequency, scale, and impact, predominantly driven by climate change induced Monsoon rainfall and glacial melt fed Indus River. Furthermore, persistent governance deficits and grave environmental degradation exacerbate flood vulnerabilities in the country. The floods impact human security across all dimensions: personal, economic, food, health, community, political, and environmental. This study contends that flood susceptibility in the country is a compounding product of mutually reinforcing social and environmental systems failure, and should be addressed by integrating both systems as a unified system. Treating the flooding events in the country not as isolated hydrological/natural disasters but as the manifestation of the intersection of global climatic extremes and social and environmental system failure, the study employs the Social Ecological Systems (SES) Framework. Through the SES vision, this study aims to assess how social systems- anthropogenic attributes and governance structure in Pakistan interact with ecological systems and environmental systems to increase or decrease flood threats. To this end, the study has employed a qualitative research approach and descriptive analytical methods. The critical analysis has framed how social and governance breakdown and weak institutional response have produced a split in resilience based flood management in the country. The study argues that social and environmental systems in the country should be absorptive and strengthened enough to withstand such disasters while overcoming all the disturbances without compromising the previous status. The study critiques anthropogenic adverse tendencies along with the governance shortcomings, and calls for a resilience based flood management in Pakistan to protect human security. The research has provided thoughtful insights for a broader understanding of flood disaster reconceptualization with the SES framework’s principles of absorptive, adaptive, and transformative.