Establishing and Assessing a Localized Flood Vulnerability Index in the Philippines:

Flood, a natural disaster, increases its regularity of incidence and have made a toll on the lives of many people. Legazpi city, the capital of Albay, Philippines, was chosen as the study area for it has been considered as one of the cities that has a progressive economy and is an example set by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) as an area with high resilience and adaptive capability to disasters such as flood. With this, the study aims to develop a Flood Vulnerability Index (FVI) under a local scale to clearly assess the conditions on a specific level and to know who among the four components (social, economic, environmental and physical) the city is most vulnerable at. Furthermore, it seeks the interest of decision, policy makers and stakeholder for this would locate the soft spots of flood using the components as determinants of those weaknesses. The use indicators to assess and measure the level of harm flood would give to the area was done and a 10 year data was gathered for calibration and verification of this methodology. Moreover, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to obtain the weights and a consistency check was performed for the robustness and credibility of each component and indicator. Additionally, a standard value of 0 to 1 to determine the vulnerability of an area, where 0 is the least vulnerable and 1 being the highest is portrayed to equalize the range for comparison. The result shows that the city has an index value of 0.509, which is under a highly vulnerable to flood scaling. It also shows that it is weakest under the physical and environmental component, thereby increasing the FVI value. Knowing that the city is most vulnerable under these two aspects, decision and policy makers can now plan to make laws and implement structures in order to mitigate flood and its further impacts.