Vulnerability and Resilience in the Face of Climate Change: Current Research and Needs for Population Information
Research on vulnerability and resilience is rooted in the common-sense observation that similar climate events can produce very different levels of socioeconomic impact, depending not only on the location and timing of occurrence, but also the resources and agility of the societies who experience climate change impacts. The degree of impact depends on the ways in which the natural triggering event interacts with particular ecosystems and with the specific characteristics of the society affected, including its level of economic development; the types of livelihoods of its members; education levels; and other factors that generally determine both how resilient the affected population is as well as what resources are available for adaptation. This paper addresses four related topics: (1) varying definitions of vulnerability and resilience (and, to a lesser extent, adaptive capacity) and the implications of those differences for societal analysis, (2) candidate approaches to characterizing societal resilience to climate change, (3) methods for assessing resilience, and (4) the potential contribution of a richer understanding of affected populations to the study of resilience.
Year: 2009
Source: PAI | Battelle
