Climate disasters impact communities universally, but climate vulnerability experienced by each community and household is distinctive. ‘Vulnerability is the state of susceptibility to harm from exposure to stresses associated with environmental and social changes and absence of the capacity to adapt’ to it (Adger 2006). There may be people within the extremely vulnerable population who are more vulnerable than others in terms of infrastructural accessibility, financial resources, etc (Croot−Holmes 2010). So, the variables chosen for vulnerability assessment should also represent the socio-economic and biophysical state of the system under examination. The vulnerability assessments often focus on realistic, concrete, and insightful aspects of a system that give a sense of the bigger picture (UNESCO n.d.).

Flood risk management and assuring the safety of the communities is a prime responsibility of the authorities for which prioritising vulnerable areas and communities for adopting effectual measures to increase resilience is significant (Nasiri et al. 2016). A concatenation of extreme and often permanent, circumstances exist, spiralling community exposure and situating the livelihood activities inordinately fragile for certain social groups (Cardona 2013). The shift in the land use pattern due to haphazard urbanization unfavourably affects the hydrological regime, leading to a degenerating water environment (Suriya−Mudgal 2012, Bueno et al. 2019). The evolution of a catchment from natural or rural conditions and then to urban settings involve pronounced changes to water and soil resources on a time scale, distinct from most of the other natural processes. This is further exacerbated by human-caused climate change, due to escalating concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHG). This can potentially surge the intensity of precipitation enhancing the eventual risk of flash flooding, pluvial and fluvial flooding etc (Bang–Burton 2021). Flood-prone regions would be confronting more floods in the future because of climate change, urbanisation, and increasing land use & land cover (LULC) change.

Similarly, the flood vulnerability of a region is often decided by the physical factors contributing to it (Hidayah et al. 2022, Lewis 2014). The connections between vulnerabilities caused by the changing exposure to flood due to climate change and the socio-economic aspects of a community that influence their capacity to adapt to the vulnerabilities is rarely explored (Mortsch 2014). This issue, if ignored, would deteriorate and eventually break the overall resilience of the system, including that of human beings, to deal with the negative impacts of flooding in the region. The dilemma is compounded by the traditional spatial planning process, which concentrates largely on delineating human settlements and physical infrastructure development regardless of the land-water interactions and other ecological considerations (Sonu et al. 2022). Such planning mechanisms often result in individualised planning for administrative divisions whose political boundaries dictate their administrative boundaries. This demands an integrated watershed-based planning and implementation framework. However, it is not pragmatic to outline an inclusive flood risk reduction strategy by generalizing these problems without explicitly scrutinizing the hotspots and main drivers (Birkmann 2007, Nazeer–Bork 2019), based on which the regions could be prioritized accordingly.

This paper inquiries into the socio-economic and biophysical vulnerability of the local self-governments1 (LSG), or the Panchayats falling within the ecological boundary of Kuttanad Wetland System (KWS), of Kerala (India) which is largely below mean sea level. The seasonal floods are constantly posing a threat to lives and livelihoods here. With parts of the landscape lying below mean sea level and its hydrology is subjected to severe manipulations, KWS is vulnerable to climate change. The frequent incidences of cyclonic depressions on the western coast of India have intensified this vulnerability. In the wake of the recent Kerala floods, which badly affected this landscape, there is a need to understand and address the climatic vulnerabilities to which stakeholders and the ecosystems are exposed. There is also infrastructure vulnerability which enhances the impact of disasters faced by people residing in low-lying areas.

This exercise is expected to help in developing a framework for prioritising the LSGs for capacity building for adaptation and mitigation. The sequence of maps and list of panchayats based on flood vulnerability indexing (FVI) will help in prioritizing the domain of interventions within the LSGs to incorporate in designing or planning adaptive measures.

The scope of the research is limited to the Tier 1 level (see Figure 1) of the Panchayats (LSG) of the KWS to address the flood vulnerability of environmentally sensitive regions, particularly wetlands.