Assessing Vulnerabilities to the Effects of Global Change: An Eight-Step Approach

Abstract

There is a growing call among researchers interested in studying global change and associated effects on society and ecosystems to examine vulnerabilities as well as impacts. Such a move would require a renewed emphasis on the factors that constrain and enable coupled human-environment systems to adapt to stress. Although a picture is emerging of what general factors global change vulnerability assessments should address, it is less clear what methods are needed for this endeavor. This paper presents results from a workshop held in October 2002 to explore the issue of methods and models for vulnerability assessments. The results include an objective for global change vulnerability assessments, a set of five information criteria that vulnerability assessments should satisfy for achieving this objective, and a set of eight steps designed to satisfy those criteria. The proposed objective for global change vulnerability assessments is to inform the decision-making of specific stakeholders about options for adapting to the effects of global change. The five criteria for achieving the objective are that vulnerability assessments should: engage a flexible knowledge base, be place-based, consider multiple and interacting stresses, examine differential adaptive capacity between and within populations, and be prospective as well as historical. The eight steps for satisfying the criteria are: define the study area in tandem with stakeholders, get to know places over time, hypothesize who is vulnerable to what, develop a causal model of vulnerability, find indicators for the components of vulnerability, weight and combine the indicators, project future vulnerability, and communicate vulnerability creatively. We expect most readers to identify some of the steps as self-evident and part of their well-established disciplinary practices. However, most readers should also identify one or more steps as uncommon to their research traditions. Thus taken together the eight steps presented here constitute a novel methodological framework.