EGS 3021F: Vulnerability to Environmental Change
Gina Ziervogel (gina@csag.uct.ac.za)
December 2011
This work by Gina Ziervogel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
•Risk/Hazard
•Political economy/ecology
•Ecological resilience
Eakin and Luers (2006)
Approach to vulnerability research

Focal Questions:
 What are the hazards?
 What are the impacts?
 Where and when?

Key attributes:
 Exposure (physical threat, external to system)
 Sensitivity

Exposure unit:
 Places, sectors, activities
 Landscapes, regions

Decision scale of audience
By Gina Ziervogel
 Regional
 Global
(Eakin and Luers, 2006)
The degree to which an exposure unit is
susceptible to harm due to exposure to a
perturbation or stress, and the ability (or lack
thereof) of the exposure unit to cope,
recover, or fundamentally adapt (become a
new system or become extinct).
(Kasperson et al, 2001)

Evolved from natural hazards literature
 Hazards characterisation, risk threshold, human
behaviour
 Geographers such as
▪ Gilbert White – human factors involved in disasters
Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global (1974)
▪ Burton I, White G, Kates R. 1978. Environment as Hazard. New
York: Oxford Univ.
▪ Cutter SL. 1996. Vulnerability to environmental hazards. Prog.
Hum. Geogr. 20:529–39

Used in IPCC (2001)
 Sensitivity to risk + possible economic & social losses
 Quantifications used as proxy for vulnerability

Late 1990s
 Increased attention to social drivers and institutional
conditions
▪ Kelly PM, Adger WN. 2000. Theory and practice in assessing
vulnerability to climate change and facilitating adaptation.
Clim. Change 47:325–52
▪ Burton I, Huq S, Lim B, Pilifosova O,Schipper EL. 2002. From
impacts assessment to adaptation priorities: the shaping of
adaptation policy. Clim. Policy 2:145– 159
Source: Emergency Events Database EM-DAT
Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters CRED
(http://www.emdat.be/)
Definition of disaster:
>10 killed
>100 affected
( Munich Re 2000, in Kasperson et al, 2005: 154 )

(
(www.reliefweb.int)
(www.reliefweb.int)
4 Jan 2009
14 April 2009



54 000 people displaced
Damage to bridges/roads
affecting 344 000
145 deaths
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IO
TD/view.php?id=38212


‘Natural’ hazards should be seen as ‘social’
hazards
Need to acknowledge how political and
economic forces make people more
vulnerable
(Wisner et al, 2004)
(Kaplan et al, 2009)
(Kaplan et al, 2009)
Approach to vulnerability research

Political ecology approaches to vulnerability
emerged in response to risk-hazard
assessment of climate impacts and disasters
▪ Hewitt K, ed. 1983. Interpretations of Calamity. Boston,
MA: Allen & Unwin

Characteristics:
 Analyses of social and economic processes
 Interacting scales of causation
 Social differences
(Eakin and Luers, 2006)

Focal Questions:
 How are people and places affected differently?
 What explains differential capacities to cope and
adapt?
 What are the causes and consequences of differential
susceptibility?

Key attributes:
 Capacity
 Sensitivity
 Exposure

Exposure unit
 Individuals, households, social groups
 Communities, livelihoods

Decision scale of audience
 Local
 Regional
 Global

“Vulnerability comes at the confluence of
underdevelopment, social and economic
marginality and the inability to garner
sufficient resources to maintain the natural
resource bases and cope with the
climatological and ecological instabilities of
semi-arid zones”
(Ribot et al, 1996)
 Sociopolitical
 Cultural
 Economic factors
Differential:
- Exposure to hazards
- Impact
- Capacities
Underpinned by Amartya Sen’s concept of entitlements
and capabilities
• Sen (1981).Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and
Deprivation.
Links to Bohle et al.’s (1994) ‘space’ of vulnerability
(Bohle et al, 1994)
Mexico:
Differential outcomes in crop yields during drought
can’t be explained by rainfall
 Land tenure
 Historical biases in access to resources
Colonial political economy, imposed by Spanish, allowed
landholders to manipulate price of staples  poor
suffered
Poor lack credit, fertilizer etc.
New techniques for agricultural intensification replace
traditional hazard prevention strategies
(Liverman, 1994)
( http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/ENVT.51.2.26-36)

Hazards associated with hurricanes:





High winds
Tornadoes
Heavy rainfall
Rain-induced flooding
Response:
 Evacuation
 Sheltering

Social and racial stratification in
America has impacted on response
(Cutter and Smith, 2009)
(http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/RisingCost/)

1926 – Mississippi river
 White power barons demanded that levee downstream
be destroyed to alleviate flooding potential
 Dynamited banks and destroyed homes and
businesses of poor African Americans to save wealthy
city

2005 – Hurricane Katrina
 Preparation and response – differential treatment
following class and racial divides
 Lessons learnt?
(Cutter and Smith, 2009)

Evacuated 1.9 million people
 53 deaths
 2 evacuations: 1 for those with car and 1 for those without
▪ Those with cars returned 3 days after event

Those without cars
 Designed to be race and class neutral
 Mainly poor and minority groups
 Transported on state buses
▪ not told where they were going or how long it would take
 Insufficient facilities (sleeping, ablution)
 Sex offenders told to ‘fend for themselves’
 Returned more than 5 days later
(Cutter and Smith, 2009)
Major Hurricanes not frequent along this coast
 125 lives lost
 mainly white middle income residents
 1 million evacuated, 100 000 didn’t
 although category 2 hurricane, category 4 storm
surge with strong winds
(Cutter and Smith, 2009)
(Cutter and Smith, 2009: 33)
Approach to vulnerability research

Focal questions
 Why and how do systems change?
 What is the capacity to respond to change?
 What are the underlying processes that control
the ability to cope or adapt?
By Gina Ziervogel

Exposure unit
 Coupled human-environment systems
 Ecosystems

Decision scale
 Landscapes
 Ecoregions
 Multiple scales

Resilience is “the capacity of a system to
undergo disturbance and maintain its functions
and controls” (Carpenter et al, 2001: 766)

Key attributes





Amount of change the system can undergo
Threshold identification
Degree of self-organisation
Degree to build capacity to learn and adapt
Factors than enable disturbance to be absorbed
(Carpenter et al, 2001)

Resilience for whom or what?

Cannot assume social and ecological
resilience move in the same direction
 Food production increases and ecological
diversity decreases
(Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, http://www.maweb.org/en/Scenarios.aspx )
 Contrasts to earlier views of system existing near
equilibrium
 Engineering resilience – return to predisturbed
state after disturbance
 Systems exhibit non- and multi-equilibrium
dynamics
 Human activity one of many driving forces
 Timmerman (1981)
▪ Vulnerability, resilience and the collapse of society
▪ Linked resilience theory to social sciences
▪ Vulnerability of society to hazard result of rigidity
 Adaptive co-management of human-managed
resource systems
▪ Enable dynamic learning
▪ Enhance flows of knowledge across scales
Integrating resilience, political ecology and risk/hazard
Resilient SES have diverse mechanisms for
living with and learning from change and
uncertainty
Instead of attempting to control changes the
concept of resilience aims at “sustaining and
enhancing the capacity of SESs to adapt to
uncertainty and surprise.”
(Adger et al, 2005)

Hazards become disasters when resilience is
eroded because of :
 Environmental change
 Human action

Components of resilience easily eroded if
importance not recognized
 e.g. overfishing and pollution
 can’t absorb disturbance
 regime shifts
 coral replaced by seaweed
(Adger et al, 2005)
Field in Banda
Aceh, Indonesia
(Adger et al,
2005)

Ecological resilience
 Close to epicentre: Mangroves, dunes etc made no
difference to impact
 Sri Lanka: smaller waves dissipated by mangroves

Strong local governance
 Less impact in west Sumatra and Thai island
 Inherited knowledge of tsunamis, early warning

Where ecosystems were undermined, harder to
recover
 Loss of traditional income sources
(Adger et al, 2005)

Regenerating physical and ecological structures
doesn’t solve problem
 Strengthen long-term employment
 Manage natural resilience of reefs
▪ water quality  coral reefs
 Need to address multiple scales

Reducing perverse incentives that
 Destroy natural capital
 Exacerbate vulnerability
(Adger et al, 2005)



Vulnerability definitions and concepts
Vulnerability frameworks
Conceptual approaches
Vulnerability
approach
1
Why and how do systems change?
2
Key attributes: exposure and sensitivity
3
Exposure unit: individuals
4
5
What are the causes and consequences of
differential susceptibility?
Gilbert White
6
Threshold identification
7
Sen’s concept of entitlement
1
Why and how do systems change?
Vulnerability
approach
Resilience
2
Key attributes: exposure and sensitivity
Risk/hazard
3
Exposure unit: individuals
Political ecology
4
Political ecology
5
What are the causes and consequences of
differential susceptibility?
Gilbert White
6
Threshold identification
Resilience
7
Sen’s concept of entitlement
Political ecology
Risk/hazard
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Disasters. Science, 309 (5737): 1036-1039
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geography of food insecurity. Global Environmental Change, 4(1): 37-48
Carpenter SR, Walker BH, Anderies JM, Abel N. 2001. From metaphor to measurement: Resilience of what to what?
Ecosystems 4:765–81
Chopra, K., Leemans, R., Kumar, P., and Simons, H. 2005. Ecosystems and Human Well-being: Policy responses,
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Covelo, London: Island Press. (accessed at http://www.maweb.org/en/Scenarios.aspx)
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Environment and Resources, 31: 365-394
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White, K.S (eds). Contribution of Working Group II to the Third Assessment Report, Cambridge, United Kingdom
and New York, USA: Cambridge University Press. (accessed at http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/ )
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vegetation during the 2004 Tsunami in Sri Lanka. Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, 9: 1479-1494
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Environmental Risks and Hazards. Prentice Hall: Saddle River, NJ. (Reprint of 1990 report published by Clark
University)
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All web links were checked in November 2011