Vulnerability, Resilience, & Adaptation: Societal Causes and Responses

1. Vulnerability, Resilience, & Adaptation: Societal Causes and Responses Elizabeth L. Malone Joint Global Change Research Institute CRCES Workshop: Societal Impacts of Decadal Climate Variability in the United States 26-28 April 2007

2. Will better information— i.e., predictions about climate variability and change and their impacts— help societies build resilience and adaptive capacity? Answer: Not necessarily, unless people see how such information relates to their lives and their future. 2

3. Rationale for studying vulnerability, resilience, and adaptation • These connect climate with societal issues, such as development and well-being  salience. • By assessing current vulnerability, resilience, and adaptive capacity, we gain insight into current dependence on climate and can extend that insight to climate change. E.g., current lack of adaptation to current climate may mean less resilience/more vulnerability in the future. • Once the climate-society relationship begins to be defined, information about future climate becomes more important. 3

4. Why the Vulnerability-Resilience Indicators Model (VRIM)? • Changes the focus from physical impacts to meaningful societal consequences • Brings together social, economic, and environmental factors • Summarizes information via quantitative indicators • Scenario-driven, i.e., allows different future conditions to be explored • Allows comparisons (unlike most case studies) while preserving transparency (in sources of the “scores”). 4

5. Important Concepts • Vulnerability: capacity to be harmed; composite of sensitivity, adaptability, and exposure • Resilience: the ability to cope with or recover from exposure or shocks • Sensitivity: the degree to which changes and/or variability in climate lead to changes in system attributes • Adaptation: adjustments in anticipation of or in response to climate change and/or variability • Adaptive capacity: the ability to adjust to new conditions • Exposure: climate stimuli that affect a system or region 5

6. Source: Brenkert and Malone, 2005. 6

7. Human settlement and infrastructure Population at flood risk from sea level rise Population without access to clean water and sanitation Food Security Cereals production/ crop land area Protein consumption/ per capita Ecosystem sensitivity Percent irrigated land Fertilizer use Water security Water availability (demand/ supply) Precipitation amount Human health Fertility rate Life expectancy Sensitivity 7

8. Economic capacity GDP per capita Equity index Human capital Dependency Ratio Literacy rate Environmental capacity Land use measure (% unmanaged land) SO2 emissions per unit area Population density Coping and adaptation capacity 8

9. Example: Mexico rankedamong countries: second quartile 63rd of 160 countries

11. The states with the highest and lowest resilience are similar in ecosystem resilience and close in environmental capacity, but differ greatly in settlement security, food security, human health, human resources and economic capacity

12. Comparison of projected resilience of two Mexican states

13. Assessing resilience and adaptive capacity reveals policy spaces for building both • Although geographic and climatic conditions are important, even more important are the social-ecological systems in a region. • Results lead to the next set of questions about policy priorities in an area – but clearly different places have different policy needs. • The VRIM country-level adaptive capacity results have been combined with projected climate change from the COSMIC model to show that impacts may well outrun adaptive capacity in most places during this century (Yohe et al. 2006). 13