Vulnerability and Global Environmental Change By Roger Kasperson, Executive Director Stockholm Environment Institute, Sweden

Since at least Amartya Sen’s (1981) classic study of famine in Bengal, it has been apparent that vulnerability to environmental change and human events is a major shaper of global risk. Indeed, in Our Common Future, the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) underscores the intertwining of poverty and global environmental threats. Risk is closely tied to vulnerability and can be viewed as a joint product of environmental stress and human and ecological vulnerability. The human and ecological vulnerability are often, perhaps usually, interactive in ways that are not well understood. Communities that are most vulnerable may also be those most at risk to shock or disturbance to normal daily life. Although different communities may face the same risks, they are not equally vulnerable. And it is clear that vulnerability is a much more complex matter than poverty, as Kates and Haarmann (1992) have shown. A complex interaction exists between the exogenous (external threat/event) and the internal capacity of a community or household to withstand or respond to the event. The close interaction that exists between the social and economic vulnerability of populations and the degree of resilience of ecosystems suggests that an integrated approach treating both the human and natural realms is required for significant progress in understanding differential vulnerability of regions, places, and peoples.

Although much of the debate around vulnerability has focused on risk and what predisposes people to risk, a closer examination of resilience or capacity to withstand heightened vulnerability is an urgent priority, as recognised by the IHDP and other groups (such as IPCC). Vulnerability may be defined as the characteristics of persons or groups in terms of their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist, and recover from the impacts of environmental change (Vogel 1998). Vulnerability can thus be viewed along a continuum from resistance and resilience to susceptibility. Most vulnerable people across the globe choose a wide variety of options to increase their adaptability and to minimise their risk in times of stress and shock.

Households have portfolios of investments and stores that can be drawn down during times of stress. There are also differences in risk-minimising responses along class lines, with poorer households usually compelled to dispose of larger and more essential assets (e.g., cattle) earlier on than relatively richer households, which have more options.

A key research issue in seeking to understand vulnerability is the need to better grasp the causal structures (or maps) of current patterns of vulnerability and how these causal structures that shape immediate attributes of risk and vulnerability are embedded in the basic properties and processes of society, economy, and polity. As yet we have few searching explorations, much less modelling efforts, of these causal “maps.” Such maps will need to be rich in their cross-scale analyses, for the multiple stresses that bear upon vulnerable regions and people often emanate from higher levels of scale as do societal forces that structure vulnerabilities. Yet vulnerability typically is also a matter of locality, where the specific characteristics of community, household, and social networks matter greatly. In coping with stresses, environmental and socio-economic, vulnerable populations draw upon entitlements and coping resources that range across multiple scales. Characterising sequential coping, the drawdown of buffering resources, and the social learning involved in continuing encounters with stress is an essential task for the next generation of vulnerability research.

Considerable useful work on vulnerability has been conducted over the past two decades. The three assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have inventoried much of the empirical knowledge of impacts of climate change and factors predisposing populations to vulnerability and risk. A variety of studies has been completed on “red zones” of environmental degradation, “critical regions” of threat, and “hot spots” of biodiversity loss (see the overview in Kasperson, Kapserson, and Turner 1995). And a number of different models, analytic approaches, and methodologies are apparent, including efforts to develop indexes of vulnerability (see GECHS 1999) and an assessment of “syndromes” of climate change impacts (Schellnhuber et al. 1997). The time is opportune for a careful assessment of the current state of knowledge and approaches; indeed, significant future scientific progress is unlikely in the absence of greater conceptual progress, methodological development, and prioritisation of research efforts. In this context, it is encouraging that the IHDP has defined vulnerability as an important cross-cutting priority for the efforts of its research groups during the coming years. This recognition is shared in various other quarters as well, as in terrestrial ecosystems research, food security systems, land-use/land-cover change, clean water scarcity, climate change, and the broad-based emerging effort, centred at Harvard University, to develop a new sustainability science. Vulnerability research and assessment is one of the major themes under active exploration in the umbrella sustainability science effort.

An important review of the state-of-the-art of vulnerability research and applications in climate change assessment occurred at Airlie House in the Washington region in May 2000. This meeting brought together leading researchers on vulnerability issues and assessors who were incorporating vulnerability considerations in assessment of potential climate change impacts. Major themes addressed at this intensive workshop were the nature of vulnerability; multiple stresses and multiple effects; cross-scale issues; scenarios, indicators, and metrics; and research and assessment priorities. The workshop results stimulated subsequent efforts to develop a sustainability science, and to include vulnerability as a major component of that work.

On 17-19 May 2001 an international workshop, co-sponsored and supported by IHDP, will be held at the Stockholm Environment Institute. This effort will build upon the Airlie House and sustainability science initiatives, as well as the active work in the various IHDP projects. The meeting will seek to push integrative work on vulnerability another significant step forward through discussions of conceptual models, “hot-spot” and “critical region” assessments, key methodological issues, initiatives needed to improve assessment practices over the next term, and priorities for further development of research and assessment. A workshop summary will be widely distributed following the meeting.

References

• Global Environmental Change and Human Security. 1999. Global Environmental Change and Human Security, Science Plan. IHDP Report No. 11. Bonn: IHDP.
• Kasperson, Jeanne X., Roger E. Kasperson, and B.L. Turner, II, eds. 1995. Regions at risk: Comparisons of threatened environments. Tokyo: United Nations University.
• Kates, Robert W. and Viola Haarmann. 1992. Where do the poor live? Environment 34 no. 4 (May): 4-11, 25-28.
• Schellnhuber, H-J., et al. 1997. Syndromes of global change. GAIA 6 no.2: 19-34.
• Sen, Amartya. 1981. Poverty and famines: An essay on entitlement and deprivation. Clarencon: Oxford University Press.
• Vogel, Coleen. 1998. Vulnerability adn global environmental change. LUCC Newsletter 3(March): 15-19 World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future.Oxford: Oxford University Press.