Section 2: Vulnerability approaches

1. EGS 3021F: Vulnerability to Environmental Change Gina Ziervogel (gina@csag.uct.ac.za) December 2011 Section 2:Vulnerability approaches This work by Gina Ziervogel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

2. Conceptual lineages of vulnerability research: • Risk/Hazard • Political economy/ecology • Ecological resilience Eakinand Luers (2006)

3. Risk/hazard Approach to vulnerability research

4. Risk/hazard approach • Focal Questions: • What are the hazards? • What are the impacts? • Where and when? • Key attributes: • Exposure (physical threat, external to system) • Sensitivity

5. ……Risk/hazard approach • Exposure unit: • Places, sectors, activities • Landscapes, regions • Decision scale of audience • Regional • Global (Eakin and Luers, 2006) By Gina Ziervogel

6. Definition of vulnerability ……Risk/hazard approach The degree to which an exposure unit is susceptible to harm due to exposure to a perturbation or stress, and the ability (or lack thereof) of the exposure unit to cope, recover, or fundamentally adapt (become a new system or become extinct). (Kasperson et al, 2001)

7. History ……Risk/hazard approach • Evolved from natural hazards literature • Hazards characterisation, risk threshold, human behaviour • Geographers such as • Gilbert White – human factors involved in disasters Natural Hazards: Local, National, Global (1974) • Burton I, White G, Kates R. 1978. Environment as Hazard. New York: Oxford Univ. • Cutter SL. 1996. Vulnerability to environmental hazards. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 20:529–39

8. ……Risk/hazard approach • Used in IPCC (2001) • Sensitivity to risk + possible economic & social losses • Quantifications used as proxy for vulnerability • Late 1990s • Increased attention to social drivers and institutional conditions • Kelly PM, Adger WN. 2000. Theory and practice in assessing vulnerability to climate change and facilitating adaptation. Clim. Change 47:325–52 • Burton I, Huq S, Lim B, PilifosovaO,Schipper EL. 2002. From impacts assessment to adaptation priorities: the shaping of adaptation policy. Clim. Policy 2:145– 159

9. Definition of disaster: >10 killed >100 affected Source: Emergency Events Database EM-DAT Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters CRED (http://www.emdat.be/)

10. Great natural catastrophes and economic losses ( Munich Re 2000, in Kasperson et al, 2005: 154 )

11. Recent natural hazards • ( (www.reliefweb.int)

12. Mexico (www.reliefweb.int)

13. Flooding 4 Jan 2009 • 54 000 people displaced • Damage to bridges/roads affecting 344 000 • 145 deaths 14 April 2009 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=38212

14. Critique • ‘Natural’ hazards should be seen as ‘social’ hazards • Need to acknowledge how political and economic forces make people more vulnerable (Wisner et al, 2004)

16. (Kaplan et al, 2009)

17. (Kaplan et al, 2009)

18. Political economy/ecology Approach to vulnerability research

19. Political economy/ecology approach • Political ecology approaches to vulnerability emerged in response to risk-hazard assessment of climate impacts and disasters • Hewitt K, ed. 1983. Interpretations of Calamity. Boston, MA: Allen & Unwin • Characteristics: • Analyses of social and economic processes • Interacting scales of causation • Social differences (Eakin and Luers, 2006)

20. Political economy/ecology • Focal Questions: • How are people and places affected differently? • What explains differential capacities to cope and adapt? • What are the causes and consequences of differential susceptibility? • Key attributes: • Capacity • Sensitivity • Exposure

21. Political economy/ecology • Exposure unit • Individuals, households, social groups • Communities, livelihoods • Decision scale of audience • Local • Regional • Global

22. Political economy/ecology • “Vulnerability comes at the confluence of underdevelopment, social and economic marginality and the inability to garner sufficient resources to maintain the natural resource bases and cope with the climatological and ecological instabilities of semi-arid zones” (Ribot et al, 1996)

24. Political economy/ecology • Sociopolitical • Cultural • Economic factors Underpinned by AmartyaSen’s concept of entitlements and capabilities • Sen (1981).Poverty and Famines: an Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation. Links to Bohle et al.’s (1994) ‘space’ of vulnerability Differential: - Exposure to hazards - Impact - Capacities

25. Vulnerability space (Bohleet al, 1994)

26. Case study • Political economy/ecology Mexico: Differential outcomes in crop yields during drought can’t be explained by rainfall • Land tenure • Historical biases in access to resources • Colonial political economy, imposed by Spanish, allowed landholders to manipulate price of staples  poor suffered • Poor lack credit, fertilizer etc. • New techniques for agricultural intensification replace traditional hazard prevention strategies (Liverman, 1994)

27. Case study ( http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/ENVT.51.2.26-36)

28. Hurricane impact and response • Hazards associated with hurricanes: • High winds • Tornadoes • Heavy rainfall • Rain-induced flooding • Response: • Evacuation • Sheltering • Social and racial stratification in America has impacted on response (Cutter and Smith, 2009)

29. Increasing costs of natural disasters world wide (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/RisingCost/)

30. Historical response • 1926 – Mississippi river • White power barons demanded that levee downstream be destroyed to alleviate flooding potential • Dynamited banks and destroyed homes and businesses of poor African Americans to save wealthy city • 2005 – Hurricane Katrina • Preparation and response – differential treatment following class and racial divides • Lessons learnt? (Cutter and Smith, 2009)

31. 2008: Hurricane Gustav, southern Louisiana • Evacuated 1.9 million people • 53 deaths • 2 evacuations: 1 for those with car and 1 for those without • Those with cars returned 3 days after event • Those without cars • Designed to be race and class neutral • Mainly poor and minority groups • Transported on state buses • not told where they were going or how long it would take • Insufficient facilities (sleeping, ablution) • Sex offenders told to ‘fend for themselves’ • Returned more than 5 days later (Cutter and Smith, 2009)

32. 2008: Hurricane Ike, Galveston Texas Major Hurricanes not frequent along this coast • 125 lives lost • mainly white middle income residents • 1 million evacuated, 100 000 didn’t • although category 2 hurricane, category 4 storm surge with strong winds (Cutter and Smith, 2009)

33. (Cutter and Smith, 2009: 33)

34. Ecological resilience Approach to vulnerability research

35. Ecological resilience • Focal questions • Why and how do systems change? • What is the capacity to respond to change? • What are the underlying processes that control the ability to cope or adapt? By Gina Ziervogel

36. Ecological resilience • Exposure unit • Coupled human-environment systems • Ecosystems • Decision scale • Landscapes • Ecoregions • Multiple scales

37. Ecological resilience • Resilience is “the capacity of a system to undergo disturbance and maintain its functions and controls” (Carpenter et al, 2001: 766) • Key attributes • Amount of change the system can undergo • Threshold identification • Degree of self-organisation • Degree to build capacity to learn and adapt • Factors than enable disturbance to be absorbed (Carpenter et al, 2001)

38. Resilience for whom or what? • Cannot assume social and ecological resilience move in the same direction • Food production increases and ecological diversity decreases (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, http://www.maweb.org/en/Scenarios.aspx )

39. History Ecological resilience • Contrasts to earlier views of system existing near equilibrium • Engineering resilience – return to predisturbed state after disturbance • Systems exhibit non- and multi-equilibrium dynamics

40. Historical cont.. • Human activity one of many driving forces • Timmerman (1981) • Vulnerability, resilience and the collapse of society • Linked resilience theory to social sciences • Vulnerability of society to hazard result of rigidity • Adaptive co-management of human-managed resource systems • Enable dynamic learning • Enhance flows of knowledge across scales

41. Additional case study material Integrating resilience, political ecology and risk/hazard

42. Cross-cutting case study: Social-ecological resilience to coastal disasters Resilient SES have diverse mechanisms for living with and learning from change and uncertainty Instead of attempting to control changes the concept of resilience aims at “sustaining and enhancing the capacity of SESs to adapt to uncertainty and surprise.” (Adger et al, 2005)

43. Hazards become disasters when resilience is eroded because of : • Environmental change • Human action • Components of resilience easily eroded if importance not recognized   • e.g. overfishing and pollution  can’t absorb disturbance regime shifts  coral replaced by seaweed (Adger et al, 2005)

44. Field in Banda Aceh, Indonesia (Adger et al, 2005)

45. Tsunami impact and response • Ecological resilience • Close to epicentre: Mangroves, dunes etc made no difference to impact • Sri Lanka: smaller waves dissipated by mangroves • Strong local governance • Less impact in west Sumatra and Thai island • Inherited knowledge of tsunamis, early warning • Where ecosystems were undermined, harder to recover • Loss of traditional income sources (Adger et al, 2005)

46. Resilience response • Regenerating physical and ecological structures doesn’t solve problem • Strengthen long-term employment • Manage natural resilience of reefs • water quality  coral reefs • Need to address multiple scales • Reducing perverse incentives that • Destroy natural capital • Exacerbate vulnerability (Adger et al, 2005)

47. Review of vulnerability approaches

48. Review • Vulnerability definitions and concepts • Vulnerability frameworks • Conceptual approaches

49. Review of vulnerability approachesChoose from Risk/Hazard; Political economy; Ecological resilience

50. Review of vulnerability approaches