Global Environmental Change 16(2006)268–281
Vulnerability
W.Neil Adger
山西招生考试Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Rearch,School of Environmental Sciences,University of East Anglia,Norwich NR47TJ,UK
Received 8May 2005;received in revid form 13February 2006;accepted 15February 2006
Abstract
This paper reviews rearch traditions of vulnerability to environmental change and the challenges f
体育说课稿or prent vulnerability rearch in integrating with the domains of resilience and adaptation.Vulnerability is the state of susceptibility to harm from exposure to stress associated with environmental and social change and from the abnce of capacity to adapt.Antecedent traditions include theories of vulnerability as entitlement failure and theories of hazard.Each of the areas has contributed to prent formulations of vulnerability to environmental change as a characteristic of social-ecological systems linked to resilience.Rearch on vulnerability to the impacts of climate change spans all the antecedent and successor traditions.The challenges for vulnerability rearch are to develop robust and credible measures,to incorporate diver methods that include perceptions of risk and vulnerability,and to incorporate governance rearch on the mechanisms that mediate vulnerability and promote adaptive action and resilience.The challenges are common to the domains of vulnerability,adaptation and resilience and form common ground for consilience and integration.r 2006Elvier Ltd.All rights rerved.
Keywords:Vulnerability;Disasters;Food incurity;Hazards;Social-ecological systems;Surpri;Governance;Adaptation;Resilience
1.Introduction
The purpo of this article is to review existing knowl-edge on analytical approaches to vulnerability to environ-mental change in order to propo synergies between rearch on vulnerability and on resilience of social-ecological systems.The concept of vulnerability has been a powerful analytical tool for describing states of suscept-ibility to harm,powerlessness,and marginality of both physical and social systems,and for guiding normative analysis of actions to enhance well-being through reduction of risk.In this article,I argue that emerging insights into the resilience of social-ecological systems complement and can significantly add to a converging rearch agenda on the challenges faced by human environment interactions under stress caud by global environmental and social change.
I review the precursors and the prent emphas of vulnerability rearch.I argue that,following decades of vulnerability asssment that distinguished between process
and outcome,much exciting current rearch emphasizes multiple stressors and multiple pathways of vulnerability.This current rearch can potentially contribute to emer-ging resilience science through methods and conceptualiza-tion of the stress and process that lead to threshold changes,particularly tho involved in the social and institutional dynamics of social-ecological systems.
Part of the potential convergence and learning across vulnerability and resilience rearch comes from a con-sistent focus on social-ecological systems.The concept of a social-ecological system reflects the idea that human action and social structures are integral to nature and hence any distinction between social and natural systems is arbitrary.Clearly natural systems refer to biological and biophysical process while social systems are made up of rules and institutions that mediate human u of resources as well as systems of knowledge and ethics that interpret natural systems from a human perspective (Berkes and Folke,1998).In the context of the social-ecological systems,resilience refers to the magnitude of disturbance that can be absorbed before a system changes to a radically different state as well as the capacity to lf-organi and the
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0959-3780/$-e front matter r 2006Elvier Ltd.All rights rerved.doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2006.02.006
E-mail address:n.adger@uea.ac.uk.
capacity for adaptation to emerging Carpenter et al.,2001;Berkes et al.,2003;Folke,2006). Vulnerability,by contrast,is usually portrayed in negative terms as the susceptib
ility to be harmed.The central idea of the often-cited IPCC definition(McCarthy et al.,2001)is that vulnerability is degree to which a system is susceptible to and is unable to cope with adver effects (of climate change).In all formulations,the key parameters of vulnerability are the stress to which a system is expod, its nsitivity,and its adaptive capacity.Thus,vulnerability rearch and resilience rearch have common elements of interest—the shocks and stress experienced by the social-ecological system,the respon of the system,and the capacity for adaptive action.The points of convergence are more numerous and more fundamental than the points of divergence.
The different formulations of rearch needs,rearch methods,and normative implications of resilience and vulnerability rearch stem from,I believe,the formulation of the objectives of study(or the system)in each ca.As Berkes and Folke(1998,p.9)point out,‘there is no single universally accepted way of formulating the linkages between human and natural systems’.Other areas of rearch in the human–environment interaction(such as common property,ecological economics or adaptive management)conceptualize social-ecological linkages in different ways.The common property resource tradition, for example,stress the importance of social,political and economic organizations in social-ecological systems,with institutions as mediating factors that govern the relation-ship between social systems and ecosystems on which they depend(Dols ak and Ostrom,20
03).Ecological economics, by contrast,links social and natural systems through analysis of the interactions and substitutability of natural capital with other forms of capital(human,social and physical)(e.g.the‘containing and sustaining ecosystem’idea of Daly and Farley,2004).Adaptive management,by contrast,deals with the unpredictable interactions between humans and ecosystems that evolve together—it is the science of explaining how social and natural systems learn through experimentation(Berkes and Folke,1998).All of the other traditions(and both vulnerability and resilience rearch in effect)ek to elaborate the nature of social-ecological systems while using theories with explanatory power for particular dimensions of human–environment interactions.
Evolving insights into the vulnerability of social-ecolo-gical systems show that vulnerability is influenced by the build up or erosion of the elements of social-ecological resilience.The are the ability to absorb the shocks,the autonomy of lf-organisation and the ability to adapt both in advance and in reaction to shocks.The impacts and recovery from Asian tsunami of2004,or the ability of small islands to cope with weather-related extremes,for example,demonstrate how discrete events in nature expo underlying vulnerability and push systems into new domains where resilience may be reduced(Adger et al.,2005b).In a world of global change,such discrete events are becoming more common.Indeed,risk and perturbation in many ways define and constitute the landscape of decision-making for social-ecological systems.
I proceed by examining the traditions within vulner-ability rearch including thefields of disasters rearch (delineated into human ecology,hazards,and the‘Pressure and Relea’model)and rearch on entitlements.This discussion is complementary to other reviews that discern trends and strategies for uful and analytically powerful vulnerability rearch.Eakin and Luers(2006),Bankoff et al.(2004),Pelling(2003),Fu sl and Klein(2006),Cutter (2003),Ionescu et al.(2005)and Kasperson et al.(2005), for example,prent significant reviews of the evolution and prent application of vulnerability tools and methods across resource management,social change and urbaniza-tion and climate change.The build on earlier elabora-tions by Liverman(1990),Dow(1992),Ribot et al.(1996), and others(e the paper by Jansn et al.(2006)for an evaluation of the minal articles).
Elements of disasters and entitlements theories have contributed to current u of vulnerability in the analysis of social-ecological systems and in sustainable livelihoods rearch.Livelihoods rearch remains,I argue,firmly rooted in social systems rather than integrative of risks across social-ecological systems.All the traditions and approaches are found in applications of vulnerability in the context of climate change.The remaining ctions of the paper examine methodological developments and chal-lenges to human dimensions rearch,particularly on measurement of vulnerability,dealing with perceptions of risk,and issues of governance.The paper demonstrates that t
he challenges are common to thefields of vulnerability,adaptation and resilience and hence point to common ground for learning between prently dis-parate traditions and communities.
2.Evolution of approaches to vulnerability
2.1.Antecedents:hazards and entitlements
A number of traditions and disciplines,from economics and anthropology to psychology and engineering,u the term vulnerability.It is only in the area of human–envir-onment relationships that vulnerability has common, though contested,meaning.Human geography and human ecology have,in particular,theorized vulnerability to environmental change.Both of the disciplines have made contributions to prent understanding of social-ecological systems,while related insights into entitlements grounded vulnerability analysis in theories of social change and decision-making.In this ction,I argue that all the disciplines traditions continue to contribute to emerging methods and concepts around social-ecological systems and their inherent and dynamic vulnerability.
While there are differences in approaches,there are many commonalities in vulnerability rearch in the
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environmental arena.First,it is widely noted that vulnerability to environmental change does not exist in isolation from the wider political economy of resource u.Vulnerability is driven by inadvertent or deliberate human action that reinforces lf-interest and the distribution of power in addition to interacting with physical and ecological systems.Second,there are common terms across theoretical approaches:vulnerability is most often con-ceptualized as being constituted by a components that include exposure and nsitivity to perturbations or external stress,and the capacity to adapt.Exposure is the nature and degree to which a system experiences environmental or socio-political stress.The characteristics of the stress include their magnitude,frequency,duration and areal extent of the hazard (Burton et al.,1993).Sensitivity is the degree to which a system is modified or affected by perturbations.1Adaptive capacity is the ability of a system to evolve in order to accommodate environmental hazards or policy change and to expand the range of variability with which it can cope.
There are,I believe,two relevant existing theories that relate to human u of environmental resources and to environmental risks:the vulnerability and related resilience rearch on social-ecological systems and the parate literature on vulnerability of livelihoods to poverty.Fig.1is an attempt to portray the overlap in ideas and tho ideas,which are distinct from each other and is bas
ed on my reading of this literature.2Two major rearch traditions in vulnerability acted as edbeds for ideas that eventually translated into current rearch on vulnerability of social and physical systems in an integrated manner.The two antecedents are the analysis of vulnerability as lack of entitlements and the analysis of vulnerability to natural hazards.The are depicted in the upper part of Fig.1,with the hazards tradition delineated into three overlapping areas of human ecology (or political ecology),natural hazards,and the so-called ‘Pressure and Relea’model that spans the space between hazards and political ecology approaches.
Other reviews of vulnerability have come to different conclusions on intellectual traditions.Cutter (1996)and Cutter et al.(2003),for example,classify rearch into first,vulnerability as exposure (conditions that make people or places vulnerable to hazard),cond,vulnerability as social condition (measure of resilience to hazards),and third,‘the integration of potential exposures and societal resilience
关就with a specific focus on places or regions (Cutter et al.,2003,p.243).O’Brien et al.(2005)identify similar trends in ‘vulnerability as outcome’and ‘contextual vulnerability’as two opposing rearch foci and traditions,relating to debates within the climate change area (e also Kelly and Adger,2000).The distinctions between outcome and process of vulnerability are also important,t
hough not captured in Fig.1,which portrays more of the disciplinary divide between tho endeavours which largely ignore physical and biological systems (entitlements and liveli-hoods)and tho that try to integrate social and ecological systems.
The impetus for rearch on entitlements in livelihoods has been the need to explain food incurity,civil strife and social upheaval.Rearch on the social impacts of natural hazards came from explaining commonalities between apparently different types of natural disasters and their impacts on society.But clearly the phenomena (of entitlement failure leading to famine and natural hazards)themlves are not independent of each other.While some famines can be triggered by extreme climate events,such as drought or flood,for example,vulnerability rearchers have increasingly shown that famines and food incurity are much more often caud by dia,war or other factors (Sen,1981;Swift,1989;Bohle et al.,1994;Blaikie et al.,1994).Entitlements-bad explanations of vulnerability focusd almost exclusively on the social realm of institu-tions,well-being and on class,social status and gender as important variables while vulnerability rearch on natural hazards developed an integral knowledge of environmental risks with human respon drawing on geographical and psychological perspectives in addition to social parameters of risk.
Vulnerability to food incurity is explained,through so-called entitlement theory,as a t of linked ec
onomic and institutional factors.Entitlements are the actual or potential resources available to individuals bad on their own production,asts or reciprocal arrangements.Food incurity is therefore a conquence of human activity,which can be prevented by modified behaviour and by political interventions.Vulnerability is the result of process in which humans actively engage and which they can almost always prevent.The theory of entitlements as an explanation for famine caus was developed in the early 1980s (Sen,1981,1984)and displaced prior notions that shortfalls in food production through drought,flood,or pest,were the principal cau of famine.It focud instead on the effective demand for food,and the social and economic means of obtaining it.
Entitlements are sources of welfare or income that are realized or are latent.They are ‘the t of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command in a society using the totality of rights and opportunities that he or she faces’(Sen,1984,p.497).Esntially,vulnerability of livelihoods to shocks occurs when people have insufficient real income and wealth,and when there is a breakdown in other previously held endowments.
1The generic meaning of nsitivity is applied in the climate change field where McCarthy et al.(2001)in the IPCC report of 2001defines nsitivity and illustrates the generic meaning with reference to climate change risks thus:‘the degree to which a system is affected,either adverly or b
eneficially,by climate-related stimuli.The effect may be direct (e.g.,a change in crop yield in respon to a change in the mean,range,or variability of temperature)or indirect (e.g.,damages caud by an increa in the frequency of coastal flooding due to a level ri)’.2
The obrvations leading to Fig.1are confirmed to an extent by the findings of Jansn et al.(2006)on the importance of Sen (1981)as a minal reference across many areas of vulnerability rearch and the non-inclusion of the prent livelihood vulnerability literature.
W.N.Adger /Global Environmental Change 16(2006)268–281
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带壳冻大虾怎么做好吃The advantage of the entitlements approach to famine is that it can be ud to explain situations where populations have been vulnerable to famine even where there are no absolute shortages of food or obvious environmental drivers at work.Famines and other cris occur when entitlements fail.
While the entitlements approach to analysing vulner-ability to famine often underplayed ecological or physical risk,it succeeded in highlighting social differentiation in cau and outcome of vulnerability.T
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he cond rearch tradition(upper right in Fig.1)on natural hazards,by contrast has since its inception attempted to incorporate physical science,engineering and social science to explain linkages between system elements.课程表格式
The physical elements of exposure,probability and impacts of hazards,both emingly natural and unnatural, are the basis for this tradition.Burton et al.(1978and 1993)summarized and synthesized decades of rearch and practice onflood management,geo-hazards and major technological hazards,deriving lessons on individual perceptions of risk,through to international collective action.They demonstrated that virtually all types of natural hazard and all social and political upheaval have vastly different impacts on different groups in society.For many natural hazards the vulnerability of human popula-tions is bad on where they reside,their u of the natural resources,and the resources they have to cope.
The human ecology tradition(sometimes labelled the political ecology stream—Cutter,1996)within analysis of vulnerability to hazards(upper right in Fig.1)argued that the discour of hazard management,becau of a perceived dominance of engineering approaches,failed to engage with the political and structural caus of vulner-ability within society.Human ecologists attempted to explain why the poor and marginalized have been most at risk from natural hazards(Hewitt,1983;Wat
ts,1983), what Hewitt(1997)termed‘the human ecology of endangerment’.Poorer houholds tend to live in riskier areas in urban ttlements,putting them at risk from flooding,dia and other chronic stress.Women are differentially at risk from many elements of environmental hazards,including,for example,the burden of work in recovery of home and livelihood after an event(Fordham, 2003).Flooding in low-lying coastal areas associated with monsoon climates or hurricane impacts,for example,are asonal and usually short lived,yet can have significant unexpected impacts for vulnerable ctions of society. Burton et al.(1993),from a mainstream hazards tradition,argued that hazards are esntially mediated by institutional structures,and that incread economic activity does not necessarily reduce vulnerability to impacts of hazards in general.As with food incurity,vulnerability to natural hazards has often been explained by technical and institutional factors.By contrast the human ecology approach emphasizes the role of economic development in adapting to changing exogenous risk and hence differences in class structure,governance,and economic dependency in the differential impacts of hazards(Hewitt,1983).
k3路由器Much of the world’s‘vulnerability as experienced’comes from perceptions of incurity.Incurity at its most basic level is not only a lack of curity of food supply and availability and of economic well-being,but also freedom from strife and conflict.Hewitt(1994,1997)argues that violence and the‘disast
ers of war’have been pervasive sources of danger for societies,accounting for up to half of all reported famines in the past century.While war and
resilience of social-ecological
Direct flow of ideas
Indirect flow of ideas
Fig.1.Traditions in vulnerability rearch and their evolution.
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civil strife often exacerbate natural hazards,the perceptions of vulnerability associated with them are fundamentally different in that food incurity,displacement and violence to create vulnerabilities are deliberate acts perpetrated towards political ends(Hewitt,1994,1997).
In Fig.1,I portray the two traditions of hazards rearch as being successfully bridged by Blaikie and colleagues(1994)in their‘Pressure and Relea’model of hazards.They propod that physical or biological hazards reprent one pressure and characteristic of vulnerability and that a further pressure comes from the cumulative progression of vulnerability,from root caus through to local geography and social differentiation.The two pressures culminate in the disasters that result from the additive pressures of hazard and vulnerability(Blaikie et al.,1994).The analysis captured the esnce of vulner-ability from the physical hazards tradition while also identifying the proximate and underlying caus of vulner-ability within a human ecology framework.The analysis was also comprehensive in eking to explain physical and biological hazards(though deliberately omitting technolo-gical hazards).Impacts associated with geological hazards often occur without much effective warning and with a speed of ont of only a few minutes.By contrast,the HIV/ AIDS epidemic is a long wave disaster with a slow ont but catastrophic impact(Barnett and Blaikie,1994; Stabinski et al.,2003).
Blaikie et al.(1994)also prescribed actions and principles for recovery and mitigation of disasters that focusd explicitly on reducing vulnerability.The pressure and relea model is portrayed in Fig.1as successfully synthesizing social and physical vulnerability.In being comprehensive and in giving equ
al weight to‘hazard’and ‘vulnerability’as pressures,the analysis fails to provide a systematic view of the mechanisms and process of vulnerability.Operationalising the pressure and relea model necessarily involves typologies of caus and categorical data on hazards types,limiting the analysis in terms of quantifiable or predictive relationships.
In Fig.1,a parate stream on sustainable livelihoods and vulnerability to poverty is shown as a successor to vulnerability as entitlement failure.This rearch tradition, largely within development economics,tends not to consider integrative social-ecological systems and hence, but nevertheless complements the hazards-bad ap-proaches in Fig.1through conceptualization and measure-ment of the links between risk and well-being at the individual level(Alwang et al.,2001;Adger and Winkels, 2006).A sustainable livelihood refers to the well-being of a person or houhold(Ellis,2000)and compris the capabilities,asts and activities that lead to well-being (Chambers and Conway,1992;Allison and Ellis,2001). Vulnerability in this context refers to the susceptibility to circumstances of not being able to sustain a livelihood:the concepts are most often applied in the context of development assistance and poverty alleviation.While livelihoods are conceptualized asflowing from capital asts that include ecosystem rvices(natural capital),the physical and ecological dynamics of risk remain largely unaccounted for in this area of rearch.The principal focu
s is on consumption of poor houholds as a manifestation of vulnerability(Dercon,2004).Given the importance of this tradition and the contribution that rearchers in thisfield make to methods(e ction below),it ems that cross-fertilization of development economics with vulnerability,adaptation and resilience rearch would yield new insights.
2.2.Successors and current rearch frontiers
The upper part of Fig.1and the discussions here portray a somewhat linear relationship between antecedent and successor traditions of vulnerability rearch.This is,of cour,a caricature,given the influence of particular rearchers across traditions and the overlap and cross-fertilization of ideas and methods.Nevertheless,from its origins in disasters and entitlement theories,there is a newly emerging synthesis of systems-oriented rearch attempting,through advances in methods,to understand vulnerability in a holistic manner in natural and social systems.
Portraying vulnerability as a property of a social-ecological system,and eking to elaborate the mechanisms and process in a coupled manner,reprents a conceptual advance in analysis(Turner et al.,2003a).Rather than focusing on multiple outcomes from a single physical stress,the approach propod by Turner and colleagues (2003a)eks to analy the elements of vu
lnerability(its exposure,nsitivity and resilience)of a bounded system at a particular spatial scale.It also eks to quantify and make explicit both the links to other scales and to quantify the impact of action to cope and responsibility on other elements of the system(such as the degree of exposure of ecological components or communities).The interdisci-plinary and integrative nature of the framework is part of a wider effort to identify science that supports goals of Kates et al.,2001)and is mirrored in other system-oriented vulnerability rearch such as that developed at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Rearch(Schro ter et al.,2005;Ionescu et al.,2005). Integrative frameworks focud on interaction between properties of social-ecological systems have built on pioneering work,for example by Liverman(1990)that crucially developed robust methods for vulnerability asssment.In her work on vulnerability to drought in Mexico,Liverman(1990)argued for integrative ap-proaches bad on comparative quantitative asssment of the drivers of vulnerability.She showed that irrigation and land tenure have the greatest impact on the incidence of vulnerability to drought making collectively owned ejido land more susceptible.Thus,using diver sources of quantitative data,this study showed the places and the people and the drivers within the social-ecological system that led to vulnerability.
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