‘Rising Waters Don't Lift All Boats’: a sustainable livelihood analysis of recursive cycles of vulnerability and maladaptation to flood risk in rural Bihar,India

ABSTRACT

Bihar, in the central Gangetic Basin, is simultaneously India's poorest and most flood-prone State. Climate change models currently identify a heightening of Bihar's flood risk, as rainfall patterns become more intense and Himalayan glaciers recede. During the past half century, the major strategy deployed by the State and national governments to address the risk of floods has involved the construction of embankments: raised areas of land that seek to control river flow and provide temporary sanctuaries for flood-affected populations. In this article, qualitative data from interviews with flood-affected villagers and policy makers at local, district and State levels are used to assess the social implications of embankments as an adaptive response to flood risk. Evidence from these testimonies leads us to conceptualise embankments as contributing to recursive cycles of vulnerability, in which women, children and poorer social segments have been unwitting bearers. Hence, reliance on embankments is a maladaptation that perpetuates, if not exacerbates, the severe manifestations of social and economic inequality that continue to plague rural Bihar. Perhaps not surprisingly, the voices of those whose lives have been made more difficult by embankments are heard all too infrequently in policy debates. This emphasises the need for climate adaptation initiatives to be anchored in a sustainable livelihood approach, for which the prime analytical objective is to understand the factors that enable or constrain the abilities of people, especially those who are most vulnerable, to make decisions about their lives.     

Structural and geochronologic data from the Shin Jinst area, eastern Gobi Altai, Mongolia: Implications for Phanerozoic intracontinental deformation in Asia

The complex geology of central Asia records significant Phanerozoic growth and deformation of continental lithosphere, yet many questions about the timing and mechanisms of these processes remain. The Gobi Altai of southwestern Mongolia preserves much of this history in exposed mountain ranges and sedimentary basins. The Shin Jinst area (near latitude 44 21' to 44° 32', longitude 99°35' to 99° 25') contains important evidence of Paleozoic growth and accretion as well as subsequent Mesozoic and Cenozoic deformation. Detailed mapping and structural data, including data sets on folds and cross-cutting faults, point to repeated episodes of deformation and add to recent work that documents Triassic and Jurassic compression as well as Cenozoic tectonic activity in this region. New ⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar data are interpreted to record Permian to Jurassic convergent margin processes. In particular, these data, in combination with previous studies, suggest that southern Mongolia records protracted deformation throughout the Jurassic that likely resulted from compression associated with the subduction zone at the southern margin of Asia at that time.