Towards a Spatial Analysis of Vulnerability to Environmental Stress

About

Colin Polsky is a geographer specializing in the human dimensions of global environmental change, emphasizing the statistical analysis of agricultural vulnerability to climate change. In Fall 2001 he will be joining the "Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability" program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Polsky majored in mathematics, humanities and French in addition to geography, and in recent years has worked on integrated regional assessments of climate change impacts, as a consultant to the US EPA producing the official national inventory of greenhouse gas emissions and sinks, and as a research assistant to economists in support of international litigation efforts. In this presentation he will discuss guidelines for analyzing geographic variations in vulnerability to environmental stress. He hypothesizes that the vulnerability of a given place is partially a function of the vulnerabilities of neighboring places. Vulnerability is not a random process that occurs in a spatial vacuum. Instead, a spatially non-random structure -- a "geography of vulnerability" -- should emerge, for two reasons: social and physical influences on behavior typically covary with location, and people often emulate their neighbors' behaviors. Vulnerability is thus a function of contexts ("spatial effects") as well as individual behavior.