A Geospatial Approach to Ecosystem and Infrastructure Resilience

Abstract

This PhD thesis is an attempt to apply the idea of resilience to the contexts of the environmental impacts of transport infrastructure as well as the impact of flood hazards on critical infrastructure services. The conceptual development of resilience arose from the ecological sciences and psychology. However it is gaining popularity in the policy realm. The growth in resilience literature has been informed by increasing climatic and environmental risks. Hence, climate resilient development (CRD) and sustainable growth have become a necessity as well as a policy challenge. Despite the bourgeoning resilience literature, the opportunities to operationalise the various emergent ideas have been limited. It is imperative that the enactment of the resilience idea should be in the backdrop of human-environment interaction because it forms the basis of the sustainability question. Paradoxically, the very economic growth that human wellbeing is dependent on has led to environmental imbalance as well as a changing climate. Thus, it was decided that resilience should be examined in two dimensions. The first one arises from the environmental disturbance caused by increase in anthropogenic activities. The other is through the impact of hazards on infrastructure services. Two separate case studies were used in this thesis to examine each of these dimensions of resilience. The deployment of the Konkan Railway in the eco sensitive Western Ghats Region (WGR) forms the first case study to understand ecological or ecosystem resilience. Persistent flooding in Northern Bihar forms the context for the second case study that examines infrastructure resilience. The Konkan railway became an ideal case study to examine ecosystem resilience because its construction and deployment was shrouded in environmental controversy. Damage and loss of accessibility to critical infrastructure services like healthcare during floods from the Kamla river in Northern Bihar creates an apt case study to examine infrastructure resilience.