Methodological challenges in the vulnerability assessment to climate change

Effective adaptation to climate change is dependent on the identification and proper understanding of the vulnerable system in question, the stressors it is exposed to, as well as the processes generating its vulnerability. In the literature, this exercise is generally termed “climate change vulnerability assessment” (CCVA). Although CCVA can take many forms, it consists, either implicitly or explicitly, of assessing the vulnerability of a valued attribute of a socio-ecological system (SES) to one or more climate related hazards. CCVA can help in identifying vulnerable “hot spots,” better allocating adaptation resources, better understanding systemic weaknesses which make the system vulnerable, monitoring the effects of adaptation measures, or better communicating the risk and justifying policy to the public. We discuss some of the most important methodological challenges facing CCVA, including geographical and temporal scales, aggregation, and nonlinearity. CCVA literature is large and multidisciplinary and appears to stem from a number of different paradigms (risk assessment, natural disaster management, urban planning, etc.). It is therefore difficult to elicit major directions, findings, and methodologies from this body of work. We study a sample of peer-reviewed CCVA publications and investigate the extent to which the CCVA literature is foregrounding and engaging with these methodological problems.

Keywords:

socio-ecological system (SES) , sensitivity , exposure , adaptive capacity.