Environmental change is significantly altering hydrological systems worldwide, with substantial impacts for the people who live on floodplains and depend on rivers for their livelihoods and lifeways. Amazonia is a region significantly affected by these changes, particularly more severe flooding. This paper proposes a multi-scalar approach to vulnerability, applying it empirically to the analysis of household vulnerability to the 2011 flood—the second largest flood event along the Ucayali River in 30 years—in terms of exposure, impacts, and responses. Locally relevant indicators for assets, social identity, and social networks at the community and household levels are used to examine their role in shaping flood vulnerability, the interplay of community-level and household-level factors, and differential vulnerability across exposure, impacts, and responses to the same hazard event. We find that the most common impacts of severe flooding in rural Amazonia are on agriculture and that fishing is the dominant response strategy. This study suggests that covariate shocks, like floods, can have distinct idiosyncratic impacts and responses among households. We demonstrate that more integrated approaches to vulnerability analysis offer potential for better understanding differential vulnerabilities within populations as well as for drawing comparisons across hazard events and different settings.
Integrated multi-scalar analysis of vulnerability to environmental hazards: Assessing extreme flooding in western Amazonia