Impacts and Risks of Global Change - Impact of Global Changes on Mountains: Responses and Adaptation - page 58

bound resources in one way or another (see Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment 2005).
Ecosystem services, primarily water, hydropower, fl ood control and
tourism, exceed the geographic limits of highlands through direct linkage
with adjacent lowlands in catchments systems and for the extractive
resources of mountains, such as timber and minerals exists global demand
(Viviroli and Weingartner 2004).
Traditional risk concept
In order to address the linkage between natural hazard impact and exposed
human systems and the intrinsic uncertainty of all future developments
the idea of risk provides a conceptual framework with a high integration
potential (e.g., Bohle and Glade 2008, Veulliet et al. 2009). In most risk
concepts the sensitivity of the reacting system to the external impulse is
determined by vulnerability and capacity, respective resilience, which
as interacting and linking factors govern the dimension of risk and as a
consequence the adaptability of the human-environment system.
Originally expressing the sensitivity of organisms to external impact
in ecological systems, vulnerability can be seen much wider. In a (under)
development context, vulnerability explains the degree to which an exposed
social system is susceptible to harm due to perturbation or stress, and
further the ability or lack thereof to cope, recover or fundamentally adapt
(see Chambers 1989). Also in the interface study between natural hazards
and human systems (Wisner et al. 2004), many approaches deal with
dimensioning vulnerability to specifi c process magnitudes (Hollenstein et
al. 2002, Thieken et al. 2005). In the context of global/regional warming,
vulnerability may be understood as the degree to which a human-
environment system is susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse
effects of changing climatic conditions (see, e.g., Füssel and Klein 2006).
Like vulnerability, the general idea of resilience, the ability of a system to
withstand a shock-impact and to rebuild itself, has been adopted by different
disciplines, thus evolving considerable understandings since it was fi rst
brought into discussion by Holling (1973).
While in natural systems, resilience stands for the capacity to tolerate
disturbances without collapsing into a new state of the system controlled
by a different set of conditions (Diamond 2005), resilience in the context of
social systems is focussed on the added capacity of individuals to anticipate
and to plan for the future (Watts and Bohle 1993). In modern interpretations,
the concept of resilience is applied to social-ecological systems (Walker et
al. 2004).