Is anyone familiar with functional formulation of Social Vulnerability and Adaptation due to Climate Change

Hi Rajiv,

Thank you for raising these very important questions.

For question one I recommend the formulation proposed by Disaster Reduction Institute which considers vulnerability as :

Vulnerability = (Exposure x Susceptibility) /

Coping Capacity

For more info See León, J. C. V. D. (2006). Vulnerability: a conceptual and methodological review. Bonn, Publications Series of UNU-EHS No. 4/2006.

For your second question I would suggest that the adaptation measures applied by the community or the system will influence on its exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity. Therefore, when you measured these dimensions and aggregate them in your vulnerability index you have already considered the aspect of adaptation and you don’t need to include it as an independent variable to the vulnerability formulation.

Cheers

Asghar

Hi Asghar

Thanks.

For the second, I was intended to measure adaptation empirically.

More over for first, how we will measure susceptibility empirically. Moreover, for the first why exposure is directly proportional to susceptibility and inversely to adaptive capacity. Can we formulate that (susceptibility - adaptive capacity) is proportional to exposure. Adaptive capacity is also spontaneous as susceptibility. Pl see.

Thanks.

Dear Murugan

Thanks. The index proposed in your paper, seems to be OK. But issue also involved why equal weightage and such a straight additive relationship.

I have already published some papers on the aspect and writing a few more. 

The plight of problem remain same.

Regards

Hi everyone,

Perhaps the Mustafa et al (2011) Vulnerability-Capacity Index (VCI) might be worthy to take a look at. Appropriate only for household- or community-level vulnerability analysis though.

Best regards,

Petros

Dear Rajiv,

As you may very well know, the adaptation and coping are strategies employed by the people. Therefore, you may employ qualitative tools for examining these strategies.

The issue of adaptive capacity, sensitivity and exposure are very closely interlinked so that many people m ix them. Some suggest for instant that exposure and sensitivity are so interlinked that we don’t need to measure them individually.

To my knowledge, the system or people with higher adaptive capacity will have more possibility and options to avoid hazardous environment. Conversely, the higher sensitivity of the system may lead to higher exposure. In the other word, the exposure has two dimensions: one is the characteristics of the hazard such as intensity, duration, frequency and so on and the second is the number of system elements exposed to the hazard which is determined by its adaptive capacity and sensitivity.

For measuring susceptibility you should carefully look at the qualification of the system under stress and see what aspects make them sensitive to external hazard. If it is a household for instance people within special age range or those with special innless might be more susceptible. The other example could be the different livelihood sources or different crops produced by the farmer and you should see which one and why is susceptible to external hazards such as drought.

Dear Rajiv Pandey,

there red have been many studies going on globally linking Sustainable Livelihood, Disaster Risk Reduction, and the Climate Change Adaptation.

You should see the following Report from European Commission to understand the relation between all  the related elements.

I for one is hooked to the famous BBC Framework . I am sure, you too will like

I think I gave you only one Reference in my earlier answer missing out the details about the BBC Framework. You should see the following reference to get a comprehensive understanding of all the Frameworks evolved over time.

From what I have seen, formulations of vulnerability indices seem to focus entirely on current snapshots since that's difficult enough to do. It would be interesting to develop an index that could take climate change projections into account and show how vulnerability is projected to change (because of changes to exposure from climate change). While this wouldn't specifically address adaptation, you could get a sense of how much adaptation will be needed (more where vulnerability increases) and also the interaction between vulnerability, adaptation and mitigation.

Thanks Dr Jayaraman for wonderful references.

Dear Trevor

Thanks.

The issue is how to include the climate projection with perception or real predicted data as well as how to adjust the adaptive capacity (that community will prefer) in the index.

Use logit models to establish the climate change and adaptation mechanism. There is a reliable information online that will enrich your study.

personally I feel that it is very difficult to quantify vulnerability. What works better is to explain what leads to vulnerabiliy (qualitative analysis).