Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 8.1
Attributes of vulnerability to environmental and social change and
perturbations
Element of vulnerability
Defi nition
Exposure
The nature and degree to which a system experiences
environmental or socio-political stress.
Sensitivity
The extent to which a human or natural system can absorb the
impacts without suffering long-term harm or some signifi cant
state change. This concept of sensitivity, closely related to
resilience, can be observed in physical systems with impact-
response models, but requires greater interpretation in
ecological and social systems, where harm and state change
are more contested.
Adaptive capacity
The ability of a system to evolve in order to accommodate
environmental perturbations or to expand the range of
variability with which it can cope.
of endangerment. He concluded, for example, that poorer households tend to live
in riskier areas in urban settlements, making them more exposed to fl ooding, disease
and other chronic stresses. A number of other geographers have also highlighted
the distinction between outcomes and processes of vulnerability in its analysis and
measurement (e.g. Liverman, 1990; Watts and Bohle, 1993; Blaikie et al., 1994;
Cutter et al., 2003; Turner et al., 2003; Leichenko and O'Brien, 2008; on methods
to measure vulnerability, see Eakin and Luers, 2006).
Vulnerability is socially differentiated: virtually all natural hazards and human
causes of vulnerability impact differently on different groups in society. Many com-
parative studies have noted that the poor and marginalised have historically been
most at risk from natural hazards. Poorer households are forced to live in higher-
risk areas and so are more likely to be affected, and to a greater extent, by earth-
quakes, landslides, fl ooding, tsunamis, and poor air and water quality, particularly
in the increasingly urbanised world (Mitchell, 1999; Pelling, 2003). Women are
differentially at risk from many environmental hazards, including, for example, the
burden of work in recovery of home and livelihood after an event (Fordham, 2003).
In many studies of the impact of earthquakes, including analysis of the Asian
tsunami of 2004, women and other household dependants suffered much greater
mortality than adult males.
Flooding in low-lying coastal areas associated with monsoon climates or hurri-
cane impacts, for example, is seasonal and usually short-lived, yet can have signifi -
cant unexpected impacts for vulnerable sections of society. But of course one
person's fl ood is another person's irrigation water. Periodic fl ooding is an integral
part of many farming systems as it provides nutrients in fertile fl oodplain areas.
Hence, natural hazards are often a disadvantageous aspect of a phenomenon at one
point in time that is predominantly benefi cial.
The concept of resilience has its roots in ecology and, when applied to interac-
tions between society and nature, provides a powerful framework for analysing the
integrated, or coupled, nature of such interacting systems. Ecology has promoted
notions of resilience, both to explain how ecosystems can radically change from one
state to another very different one and also as a guiding principle for ecosystem
