Kumar, Saransh (2026) The baseline of fragility and capability: Hedging socio-environmental impacts of Char Dham expressway in Uttarakhand, India. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32. ISSN 2665-9727
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| Abstract: | Conventional socio-environmental impact assessments (SEIAs) of linear infrastructure projects are predominantly built upon static, outcome-oriented frameworks that fail to account for the complex, non-linear dynamics of socio-ecological systems. In geographically diverse environments, administrative and planning misalignment induces a state of temporal parallelism where pre-development, active construction, and post-development phases co-occur simultaneously across different stretches of the same corridor. This spatial fragmentation collapses traditional longitudinal baselines. To address this empirical bottleneck, this study introduces a context-informed framework applied to the Char Dham Highway project in the Indian Himalayas. We implement a methodological convergence by interpreting Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based LULC outputs with integrated tabular machine learning architectures (TabNet and TabPFN) to assess relative household capabilities. Weighted across 49 socio-economic indicators surveyed from 462 local households, space-for-time substitution constructs a continuous, cumulative capability baseline through a hypothetical temporal bridge. The findings indicate that the optimized tabular foundation model (TabPFN) outperformed classical machine learning ensembles, classifying multidimensional household capability profiles with a macro-average accuracy and classification score of 86% with ROC-AUC = 0.986. |
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| Item Type: | Journal Paper |
| Keywords: | Socio-environmental impact assessmentMachine learningTemporal parallelismCapabilities approachInfrastructure development |
| Subjects: | School of Conflict and Security Studies > Conflict Resolution School of Conflict and Security Studies > Political Science |
| Divisions: | Schools > Conflict and Security Studies |
| Date Deposited: | 29 Sep 2026 06:19 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Oct 2026 08:42 |
| Official URL: | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/... |
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| Funders: | * |
| Projects: | * |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101510 |
| URI: | http://eprints.nias.res.in/id/eprint/3464 |
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