Publication

Abstract : Climate change plays an important role in intensifying the occurrences and severity of the flood disasters across the world. Hence, this study analysed the frequency of occurrence of flood events using data from EM – DAT International Disaster Database represents a steady linear rise in occurrences of the flood events over the years. The rise in level of disastrous events seeks urgent need for adaptive and mitigate flood management strategies. Multi-scale public awareness assessment is done in addition to the historical analysis using Google Trends data for three different scales: Local Awareness (LA) at sub-national level, Regional Awareness (RA) at the national level and Global Awareness (GA) across countries. Awareness metrics were computed by taking an average normalized search interest value which is scaled from 0 to 100 for the recent five years. The analysis revealed that Local awareness in India averaged 73.78, significantly higher than the Regional Awareness (50.62) and Global Awareness across the globe (17.81). This variation shows that relatively high attention for affected regions due to climate induced flooding and awareness fades sharply at the higher scale levels. In addition to this, comparative keyword analysis showed reduced public interest when flood related searches are linked to climate change. Finding highlights critical gap between increasing flood-based disaster and improper public awareness, particularly in vulnerable and globally detached countries. Proper actions are required to enhance proper resilience which includes digital awareness, early warning systems within disaster preparedness frameworks.