Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
Vulnerability and Resilience to
Environmental Change:
Ecological and Social
Perspectives
W. Neil Adger and Katrina Brown
The Vulnerability and Resilience of Society and Environments
Vulnerability and resilience are attractive concepts for geographers. Vulnerability
captures the idea that there are inherent risks that are experienced by people and
communities living in particular places. Resilience captures the ability of people
and ecosystems together to adapt to changing risks and opportunities. Physical and
biological phenomena that we describe as hazards are pervasive. Hence, vulnerabil-
ity is often measured as the extent to which a threshold to some undesirable state
has been crossed while resilience focuses on the capacity to tolerate disturbance
without collapsing into a qualitatively different state that is controlled by a different
set of processes.
Vulnerability in this context is thus about the susceptibility of groups or individu-
als to harm from social or environmental change. Vulnerability is an important
characteristic of individuals, communities and larger social groups. The vulnerabil-
ity of a group or individual depends on its capacity to respond to external stresses
that may come from environmental variability or from change imposed by economic
or social forces outside of the local domain. Thus, vulnerability does not exist in
isolation from the wider political economy but rather is related to inadvertent or
deliberate action that reinforces self-interest and the distribution of power. Vulner-
ability is made up of a number of components including exposure and sensitivity
to hazard or external stresses and the capacity to adapt. The defi nition of key terms
is outlined in table 8.1.
The defi nitions and elements of vulnerability in table 8.1 represent a convergence
of perspectives derived from different underlying paradigms in geography. Burton
et al. (1993) developed the integrative notion of vulnerability as a characteristic of
interacting forces that create environmental hazards as well as opportunities. A cri-
tique of this approach within human geography effectively pointed to the underlying
structural factors and power relations that create and maintain social vulnerabilities.
Hewitt (1983), for example, attempted to explain why the poor and marginalised
have been most at risk from natural hazards: what he termed the human ecology
