Spatio-temporal analysis of climate-induced multi-hazards in Ladakh using geospatial techniques

Ladakh, situated in the trans-Himalayan zone of northern India, faces increasing exposure to a range of climate-induced hazards due to its fragile ecosystem, complex terrain, and changing climate patterns. This study presents an integrated geospatial approach to multi-hazard assessment, focusing on floods, landslides, snow avalanches, and droughts. Using long-term average data (1994–2024), thematic layers were developed based on key environmental and climatic variables, including elevation, slope, land surface temperature (LST), NDVI, NDWI, NDSI, rainfall, soil moisture, soil texture, and land use/land cover (LULC). The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was employed to derive hazard susceptibility maps. The resulting maps show that flood susceptibility reaches moderate-to-high levels over about 4% of the area, landslides over nearly 5%, snow avalanches over roughly 0%, and drought over more than 0% of the region, delineating extensive belts along major valleys, road corridors and cold-desert rangelands. Validation using a confusion-matrix approach yields overall accuracies o 75% for floods 80% for landslides 88% for snow avalanches and 90% for drought, with kappa coefficients of 0.59, 0.66, 0.79 and 0.86 respectively, indicating substantial agreement and suitability for regional-scale applications. The results highlight the compounded vulnerability of ecologically and economically sensitive zones, with direct implications for agriculture, infrastructure and human settlements, and provide a scientific basis for targeted disaster-mitigation and climate-resilient development planning under increasing climatic extremes.