The Union Territory (UT) of Puducherry, comprising four regions, is primarily located in low-lying coastal and water-adjacent lands, making it highly vulnerable to climate change extremities and hazards such as droughts, heatwaves, floods, sea level rise (SLR), and coastal erosion. These pose significant challenges to the UT of Puducherry's agriculture, biodiversity, coastal ecosystems, infrastructure, and water resources. A comprehensive multi-hazard risk assessment is crucial to address and manage these multifaceted challenges effectively. Therefore, the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), in collaboration with the Puducherry Climate Change Cell (PCCC), conducted a climate risk assessment and developed the Climate Risk Assessment Tool (CRAT) to visualise the climate risks to agriculture, fisheries, health, livestock, tourism, urban, and water sectors. This web-based interactive tool is envisaged to support climate adaptation efforts by helping to visualise climate risks to various sectors.
This report presents the findings of the climate risk assessment conducted using the framework published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (2014). The study involved performing necessary computations to assess the three climate risk components, namely, hazard, exposure, and vulnerability (adaptive capacity and sensitivity), which can now be visualised in the developed tool as interactive components, as well as climate risk.
The findings of the risk assessment are visualised through a web-based interactive tool built using Angular, Geoserver, Django (Python), and PostgreSQL database.
The tool allows users to independently visualise the probability of occurrence of the selected hazard and their corresponding spatial extents, as well as sector-specific exposure, vulnerability, and overall risk. The tool will be particularly useful to the various line departments within the Government of Puducherry, facilitating climate-smart decision-making within their respective sectors.
Walter Samuel (Former Consultant, CSTEP) and R Sagaya Alfred, K Kalamegam, and Balaji T (DSTE, GoP) co-authored the report.
