Transcript Vulnerability, Resilience, & Adaptation: Societal Causes

Vulnerability, Resilience, & Adaptation: Societal
Causes and Responses
Elizabeth L. Malone
Joint Global Change Research Institute
CRCES Workshop: Societal Impacts of Decadal Climate Variability in
the United States
26-28 April 2007
Will better information—
i.e., predictions about climate variability and change
and their impacts—
help societies build resilience and adaptive
capacity?
Answer: Not necessarily, unless people see how
such information relates to their lives and their
future.
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Rationale for studying vulnerability,
resilience, and adaptation
These connect climate with societal issues, such as development
and well-being  salience.
By assessing current vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity,
we gain insight into current dependence on climate and can extend
that insight to climate change. E.g., current lack of adaptation to
current climate may mean less resilience/more vulnerability in the
future.
Once the climate-society relationship begins to be defined,
information about future climate becomes more important.
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Why the Vulnerability-Resilience
Indicators Model (VRIM)?
Changes the focus from physical impacts to meaningful societal
consequences
Brings together social, economic, and environmental factors
Summarizes information via quantitative indicators
Scenario-driven, i.e., allows different future conditions to be
explored
Allows comparisons (unlike most case studies) while preserving
transparency (in sources of the “scores”).
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Important Concepts
Vulnerability: capacity to be harmed; composite of sensitivity,
adaptability, and exposure
Resilience: the ability to cope with or recover from exposure or
shocks
Sensitivity: the degree to which changes and/or variability in climate
lead to changes in system attributes
Adaptation: adjustments in anticipation of or in response to climate
change and/or variability
Adaptive capacity: the ability to adjust to new conditions
Exposure: climate stimuli that affect a system or region
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Climate Change
& Variability
Sensitivity
Food
Water
Settlement
Health
Ecosystems
Mitigation
Adaptation capacity
Exposure
Human resources
Economic capacity
Environmental capacity
Vulnerability
& Resilience
Adaptation
Coping Capacity
Source: Brenkert and Malone, 2005.
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Sensitivity
Human settlement and
infrastructure


Population at flood risk from
sea level rise
Population without access to
clean water and sanitation
Food Security


Cereals production/ crop land
area
Protein consumption/ per
capita
Ecosystem sensitivity


Percent irrigated land
Fertilizer use
Water security


Water availability (demand/
supply)
Precipitation amount
Human health


Fertility rate
Life expectancy
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Coping and adaptation capacity
Economic capacity


GDP per capita
Equity index
Human capital


Dependency Ratio
Literacy rate
Environmental capacity



Land use measure (%
unmanaged land)
SO2 emissions per unit area
Population density
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Example:
Mexico ranked
among
countries:
second quartile
63rd of 160
countries
Belize
Gabon
Mauritius
Indonesia
Albania
Thailand
Barbados
Bahrain
Malta
Hungary
Bulgaria
Brazil
Czech Republic
Poland
Suriname
Lebanon
Macedonia
Ecuador
Libya
Serbia and Montenegr
Slovak Republic
Equatorial Guinea
Mexico
Peru
Cuba
Panama
Bhutan
Brunei
Sri Lanka
Oman
Jamaica
Colombia
Algeria
Malaysia
Chile
Jordan
Turkey
Ukraine
Uruguay
Vietnam
sensitivity
resilience
coping
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
100
Proxy Information on the Ranking of the Resilience Indicator
Nuevo León
Jalisco
Tamaulipas
México
Sonora
Sinaloa
Quintana Roo
Campeche
Querétaro de Arteaga
Chihuahua
México (country)
Coahuila de Zaragoza
Morelos
Tabasco
Baja California
Nayarit
Aguascalientes
Durango
Tlaxcala
Colima
Guanajuato
Michoacán de Ocampo
Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave
Hidalgo
Baja California Sur
Distrito Federal
San Luis Potosí
Zacatecas
Yucatán
Puebla
Guerrero
Chiapas
Oaxaca
population at risk due to sealevel
rise
access to safe water
access to safe sanitation
cereal production/crop land
protein demand
birth rate
life expectancy
irrigation level
fertilizer use/crop land
water availability
precipitation
GDP per capita
modified Human Devlopment Index
dependency ratio
illiteracy levels
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
1600
non-managed land (%)
SO2/total land
population density
The states with the highest and lowest resilience are similar in
ecosystem resilience and close in environmental capacity, but
differ greatly in settlement security, food security, human health,
human resources and economic capacity
120
100
80
Jalisco
60
40
Oaxaca
20
environmental
capacity
human
resources
economic
capacity
water
availability
ecosystem
resilience
health
food security
settlement
0
Comparison of projected resilience of two
Mexican states
Oaxaca
Jalisco
90
90
80
80
resilience index
100
resilience index
100
70
60
50
70
60
50
40
40
30
30
20
20
1990
2005
2020
2035
2050
2065
2080
2095
1990
2005
100
80
60
40
20
0
1990
2005
2020
2035
2035
2050
2065
2080
2095
2065
2080
2095
Oaxaca
% explanation of the uncertainty of the
resilience index by the various proxies
% explanation of the uncertainty of the
resilience index by the various proxies
Jalisco
2020
2050
2065
2080
2095
100
80
60
40
20
0
1990
2005
2020
2035
2050
Assessing resilience and adaptive capacity
reveals policy spaces for building both
Although geographic and climatic conditions are important, even
more important are the social-ecological systems in a region.
Results lead to the next set of questions about policy priorities in an
area – but clearly different places have different policy needs.
The VRIM country-level adaptive capacity results have been
combined with projected climate change from the COSMIC model
to show that impacts may well outrun adaptive capacity in most
places during this century (Yohe et al. 2006).
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