Assessing Human Vulnerability to Climate Change from an Evolutionary Perspective - Reducing Disaster: Early Warning Systems for Climate Change - page 77

Table 4.1 Characterizing adaptive capacity: the Sustainable Livelihoods framework (Krantz
2001 ; Wisner et al. 2004 ) and the Local Adaptive Capacity framework (Jones et al. 2010 )
Sustainable Livelihoods framework Local Adaptive Capacity framework

Characteristic Description Characteristic Description

Human capital Skills, knowledge, good

health and the ability
to labour

Asset base Tangible (natural, physical and

fi nancial) and intangible
(human and social) capitals

Social capital Social relations, networks,

social claims, affi liations,
and associations

Institutions and
entitlements

Equitability of access to key
assets and the process
through which institutions
evolve

Physical capital Infrastructure, technology and

equipment

Knowledge and
information

The system's ability to collect,
analyse and disseminate
information

Financial
capital

Cash, credit, savings, and
other economic assets

Innovation Degree to which the systems

fosters and retains
innovations

Natural capital Natural resources, land, water,

fauna and fl ora

Decision-making
and governance

Degree to which governance
and decision-making
systems anticipate change
and respond accordingly

4.3.2 Vulnerability Assessment

Vulnerability assessment offers an alternative approach, one with a long history of
use in a variety of different contexts - food security, water security, livelihoods, natu-
ral disasters, etc. The approach is the inverse to that of impact assessment: “The
starting point for impact assessment is the stimulus (the specifi ed climate, usually
average conditions from a climate change scenario); the starting point for vulnerabil-
ity assessment is the system (the community or region or sector)” (Smit and Pilifosova
2003 ). Importantly, unlike impact assessments, vulnerability assessments incorpo-
rate consideration of relevant non-climatic factors that affect the adaptive capacity of
the system. The goal is to obtain realistic results that fi t somewhere around the
“typical” and “smart farmer” trajectories in Fig. 4.2 (Füssel and Klein 2006 ).
To evaluate the adaptive capacity of human systems, vulnerability assessments
use a variety of empirical methods that range from relatively quantitative to highly
qualitative. Quantitative frameworks use surrogate indicators of adaptive capacity,
the value of which they obtain from open sourced data or measure using surveys
(see, e.g. Luers et al. 2003 ; Schröter et al. 2004 ; Yohe and Tol 2002 ). As outlined in
Table 4.1 , some have adopted the fi ve capitals of Sustainable Livelihoods approach
to poverty reduction as proxy indicators of adaptive capacity (see Hahn et al. 2009 ;
Osman-Elsha et al. 2005 ). Similar to the Human Development Index, the indicators
are often combined into a composite index that allows diverse variables to be inte-
grated. “Weighted averages” are sometimes used to adjust the degree of infl uence of
each indicator.