Assesse the level of vulnerability in Sri Lankan coastal areas to climate exaggerated disasters: Application of Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and Geographic Information System (GIS)

This paper demonstrated a method to assess the level of vulnerability for climate exaggerated disasters applying AHP (Analytical Hierarchical Process) and GIS (Geographic Information System). Sri Lankan cities have faced severe impacts of climate change over past years. Past records of daily temperature and rainfall data reveals significant changes of temperature and rainfall patterns during last two decades. Coastal urban areas of Sri Lanka were identified as most exposed areas for climate exacerbated disasters since they concentrate larger proportion of urban population and economic infrastructures. Identification of level of vulnerability plays an important role in decision making process. AHP builds a hierarchy of items using comparisons between items expressed as a matrix where, paired comparisons produce weighting scores. It was used to calculate the weights based on the vulnerability of each climate exaggerated disaster on key sector groupings considered critical for national development. GIS was used to identify the distribution of level of vulnerability among each coastal DSD and for spatial representation of the assessment. Result showed that Negambo, Batticalo, Mundalama, Kalpitiya, Tangalle and Ambalantota are the DSDs with highest level of vulnerability.