Geospatial analysis of the impact of flood and drought hazards on crop land and its relationship with human migration at the district level in Uttar Pradesh, India

Abstract

The main objective was to explore the connection between flood and drought hazards and their impact on crop land and human migration. The Flood and Drought effect on Cropland Index (FDCI), hot spot analysis and the Global Regression Analysis method was applied for the identification of the relationship between human migration and flood and drought hazards. The spatial pattern and hot and cold spots of FDCI, spatial autocorrelation and Getis-OrdGi* statistic techniques were used respectively. The FDCI was taken as an explanatory variable and human migration was taken as a dependent variable in the environment of the geographically weighted regression (GWR) model which was applied to measure the impact of flood and drought hazards on human migration. FDCI suggests a z-score of 4.9, which shows that the impact of flood and drought frequency on crop land is highly clustered. In the case of the hot spots analysis, out of seventy districts in Uttar Pradesh twenty-one were classified as hot spot and eight were classified as cold spots with a confidence level of 90 to 99%. Hot spot indicate maximum and cold spots show minimum impact of flood and drought hazards on crop land. The impact of flood and drought hazards on human migration show that there are fourteen districts where migration out is far more than predicted while there are ten districts where migration out is far lower.