Arctic environmental security and abrupt climate change - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 102

The concept of 'abrupt' therefore applies not only to the sudden shifts in
average air temperature, but also adaptive capacity and our ability to antici-
pate such changes. The ability of people to respond to environmental change
depends, at least in part, on the congruence between the rate of expected
change and the actual physical changes that affect a particular group (Barnett
2003; SIDA 2008). Ecosystem resilience does not depend upon perception
of the problem, but is very much tied to both rate and extent of change.
Overall, there are four primary components to the concept of vulnerability,
and to understanding what makes a particular system more or less able to
adapt to changing circumstances. Responses to environmental changes can
be both positive and negative, and the ability of a system to react positively
or adequately (i.e. the system does not suffer an overall decline) does not
merely depend upon the most visible characteristic of the system in question.
Resilient ecosystems may have high or low numbers of species, economic sys-
tems may be more vulnerable as wealth increases, and adaptation to climate
change may depend upon factors not yet well understood.
Vulnerability: risk, sensitivity, resilience
and fragility
Policymakers and analysts perhaps assume that regions like Africa are more
vulnerable to climate changes, and recent reports have focused on lesser-devel-
oped regions to create risk scenarios for climate change and security (Brown
et al . 2007). This estimation of vulnerability is true to an extent, but only by
one aspect of the components of vulnerability. As security implications are
based upon notions of vulnerability to climate change, it is notable that often
a full definition of vulnerability is omitted from analyses, and what is meant
by these terms makes little reference to previous work in risk and ecology.
Vulnerability is a general term for risk from environmental change, but is
constituted from various traditions of research, such as the biophysical risk/
hazard approach, political economy and ecological resilience. Vulnerability
definitions for policy can usefully use hybrid models (see Eakin and Luers
2006) to account for geophysical impacts on ecological systems and related
social networks, by breaking vulnerability into four main components of risk/
hazard, sensitivity, resilience and fragility measures. These categories reflect
recent efforts by the defence community in the US and UK, and related
work at the Stockholm Institute, Swedish Defence Research Institute (FOI)
and others (see also Adger 2000; Brooks 2003; Wisner et al . 2005; Haines
et al . 2006; Lantze and Raven-Roberts 2006; deFur et al . 2007; Füssel 2007;
Gallopín 2007; Briggs and Bath 2009).
The first component of vulnerability is risk, or the probabilistic measure of
adverse outcomes to which a particular group is exposed. Often the most tra-
ditional measure of vulnerability, the extent of risk is a function of probability
of hazard and the exposure level (R=[H, E]). In some iterations, this function