Spatiotemporal Assessment of Climate Change-Led Ecological Vulnerability Through DPSIR in Indian Himalayan Region

The North-Eastern Himalayan region (NEHR) of India is characterized by fragility, marginality, and remoteness with climatic and non-climatic challenges. These challenges led to significant changes in the intricate relationship between human and ecological systems. Henceforth, the present assessment aimed to evaluate ecological vulnerability at a spatiotemporal scale in the NEHR, consisting of nine states of India for three periods (2000, 2010, and 2020). The driver, pressure, state, impact, and response (DPSIR) framework based on 27 indicators consisting of ten climatic and anthropogenic drivers impacting the ecology was applied at the GIS platform through analytical hierarchy process-entropy method (AHP-EM) weighing for assessing the response, i.e., ecological vulnerability. Furthermore, Moran’s index was applied to identify drivers of ecological vulnerability and clustering of vulnerable areas. Spatially, five states showed an increasing trend in low-low vulnerability clusters, while four states had more high-high vulnerability clusters during 2020. At the temporal scale, the ecological vulnerability had increased over the last two decades, and spatially, the states of Mizoram and Meghalaya had the maximum percent of the area in high and very high vulnerability classes. The changes were largely due to changes in agroecological systems due to anthropogenic challenges, especially forest degradation (fire and fragmentation), soil erosion (jhum cultivation), and agriculture besides climate change. The results facilitate understanding the agglomeration of human habitation and ecosystems besides suggesting policy inputs for countering the challenges by devising suitable strategies for the coexistence of social and ecological systems.