The IPCC’s First Assessment Report , published in 1990, presented a description of the possible vulnerabilities experienced in different domains ; it provided no explicit definition of vulnerability. In 1995, the IPCC’s Second Assessment Report defined vulnerability as “the extent to which climate change may damage or harm a system. It depends not only on a system’s sensitivity but also on its ability to adapt to new climatic conditions” . Later, a special IPCC report titled The Regional Impacts of Climate Change: An Assessment of Vulnerability focused on presenting the current state of vulnerability for each of the world’s geographical regions. The first assessment to dedicate an entire chapter to the conceptualization and operationalization of vulnerability was the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report , published in 2001. Topics mainly focused on impacts and offered only a limited incorporation of the full social-science perspective. TAR was also the first IPCC report to introduce vulnerability as a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. These were part of the vulnerability framework used in the Fourth Assessment Report in 2007. This vulnerability formulation defines exposure as the degree of climate variation to which a system is exposed. Sensitivity is the degree to which a system is affected by such climate variation. Lastly, adaptive capacity is the system’s ability to adjust to climate variability and extreme weather events in order to moderate potential damages, and to take advantage of opportunities to cope with the consequences . In 2012, the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation introduced a framework that uses a vulnerability interpretation different from previous reports. Vulnerability, according to this framework, does not depend on climate events but is entirely based on pre-existing social vulnerability. Furthermore,greenhouse growing racks exposure does not depend on the hazard but on the amount of population and wealth at risk. This approach became prevalent in disaster management literature, where hazards and exposure areas are well-defined.
The IPCC has stated that the disaster risk-management community has helped highlight “the role of social factors in the constitution of risk, moving away from purely physical explanations and attributions of loss and damage” . It is important to understand the various levels of social vulnerability because they lead to different levels of losses and damages under similar exposure to physical phenomenon . The existing capacity to respond to a hazard predominantly determines people’s vulnerability to natural hazards rather than what may or may not happen in the future . Following this vulnerability framework shift, in 2014, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report reflected significant changes. The IPCC now sees vulnerability as shaped by human conditions; when combined with the hazard it is referred to as “climate risk.” This report moves away from interpreting vulnerability in terms of outcome and toward interpreting it contextually. It is valuable to ask how these two main vulnerability interpretations are different. Approaches to vulnerability assessment are shaped by the interpretations of both natural and social scientists. Natural scientists tend to focus on applying the concept descriptively, while social scientists search for a more contextual explanatory approach. These could be summarized in terms of the two primary interpretations of the vulnerability concept: end-point and starting-point . The end-point interpretation measures future vulnerability descriptively using a top down approach for its assessment. Outcome vulnerability is seen as a residual of impacts minus adaptation. This interpretation expects a linear result wherein projected biophysical impacts on an exposed unit are counteracted by the socio-economic capacity of the unit to take adaptation measures. A commonly used example of an outcome vulnerability framework is the one in the TAR and AR4 reports. However, the latest report and the SREX special report favor a starting-point interpretation for vulnerability. The starting-point interpretation has its origins in the desire to assess social vulnerability and identify changes and the distribution of vulnerability. This contextual vulnerability approach assumes that vulnerability is generated by a diversity of processes, but it is exacerbated by the biophysical impacts of interest . In terms of adaptive capacity, this interpretation assumes that vulnerability determines adaptive capacity. In addition, adaptive capacity is seen to be a part of present-day vulnerability.
Contextual vulnerability is the existing system’s inability to cope with changing biophysical conditions and, at the same time, be influenced by changes in other conditions . As seen in both interpretations, a chicken-or-egg dilemma of order is present with respect to adaptive capacity and vulnerability.In addition, the contextual interpretation tries to focus on the present, while an outcome interpretation concentrates on the future. O’Brien et al. emphasizes that these interpretations are complementary—they conceptualize vulnerability from different perspectives. Assessing all potential points of vulnerability is very difficult. But with the literature shifting away from a primary focus on the biophysical hazard event, stakeholders are increasingly accepting that managing a disaster goes well beyond the hazard agent itself . A greater portion of the resulting disaster is shaped by vulnerability rather than by the hazard itself . Human vulnerabilities need to be an integral concern in the development and assessment of disaster-related policies. Due to the “Babylonian Confusion” when defining vulnerability, this dissertation uses the term social vulnerability to express the vulnerability that encompasses the pre-existing conditions of a location. Since social vulnerability is partly a by-product of social inequalities, it can be defined as “the susceptibility of social groups to the impacts of hazards, as well as their resiliency, or ability to adequately recover from them” . Social vulnerability encompasses an array of concepts, including susceptibility to harm and lack of adaptive capacity . Furthermore, social vulnerability includes disturbances to livelihoods . Rural populations, especially in developing countries, practice livelihoods that directly depend on natural resources . A livelihood involves the assets and activities that combine to determine how an individual or group makes a living . For a livelihood to be sustainable,vertical hydroponic garden it needs to be able to cope with and recover from shocks and maintain or enhance people’s capabilities without undermining natural resources .
Early geographers and social anthropologists performed studies focusing on livelihoods and modes of life . However, such perspectives on development did not dominate the literature until the late 1980s, when interests in livelihoods connected three concepts: sustainable, rural, and livelihoods. Reflecting the complexities of relating these concepts, numerous frameworks that attempted to do so arose in the 1990s. The most popular became the Sustainable Livelihood Framework that resulted from research by Scoones . In the SLF, Scoones addressed issues regarding susceptibility and adaptive capacity to climate variability/change, to a limited extent . It became common to use SLF to measure social vulnerability, especially with farmers and rural populations. The SLF ascended as a holistic tool that considers not only income but also gender relations, social institutions, and property rights necessary to support a standard of living . It has been applied in various studies to examine the contextual and multi-dimensional nature of vulnerability . The framework has also proven beneficial for assessing the ability of households to withstand shocks . It highlighted that people need to possess basic tangible and intangible assets to successfully pursue different livelihood strategies . The possession and usability of assets, as described by the SLF, reveal differences in households’ recovery from disasters that could result from adaptation and livelihood resilience . The SLF looks at five types of “capitals,” for which there are wide and, for some capitals, contested literature about their definition and measurement. The capitals included in this framework are: human, social, financial, physical, and natural . The concept of capital implies the presence of usable productive resources. It is understood that all capitals are interdependent and interrelated . Capitals are not merely possessions but take three distinctive roles: a vehicle to make a living, a way to give meaning to that living, and a challenge to the structures under which people make a living . Human capital arises from the idea that nowadays humans are in charge of evolution and from the transformative effects of science and technology . Personal abilities, including education and health status, are used to measure human capital. Such capital may be the most important component of the framework , mainly because using some resources depends on an individual’s depth of knowledge and level of cognitive skills . Social capital comprises real-world links between groups or individuals that enhance networking. This capital contains features of social organization that can facilitate coordinated actions . It provides the adhesive which smooths co-operation, exchange, and innovation. However, social networks can also be a barrier that members use to exclude others and reinforce dominance or privilege. According to its effects, social capital can be divided into three categories: bonding, bridging, or linking . Social capital categorized as bonding comprises groups that tend to be homogeneous in terms of socioeconomic background. Due to the strong ties among the members, social capital in this sense can help the flow of information within the group, but it can also limit diversity . Social capital that functions as a bridge provides weaker connections among members who possess similar social standing but different backgrounds . However, this category provides a higher diversity of members. When ties between different economic and social classes exists, we can speak of linking social capital. This category aids poorer residents in obtaining information to which they did not have access within their own networks .
Compared to these human and social capitals, the last three capitals discussed in the SLF are more concrete. Financial capital refers to those assets that can be used to purchase other capitals. Physical capital represents the basic infrastructure and production equipment such as transportation, water systems, and energy. Natural capital comprises goods and services such as the type of soil, available land, and plant genetics.A single measure of vulnerability is not possible; therefore, the common approach for its quantification is through the creation of composite indices or indicator-based assessments . An indicator is an observed measure, qualitative or quantitative, that can help to simplify and explain a complex reality . A composite index aggregates several individual indicators to provide a single value that measures the multidimensional, complex, and meaningful issue of vulnerability . Plagued with a lack of consensus, an ideal methodology for the creation of a composite vulnerability index does not exist . Methods for doing so encompass uncertainty, subjectivity, and assumptions that should be recognized and made clear throughout the analysis . Such uncertainties should not be presented as a shortcoming but rather an ‘honest picture’ that stimulates the creation of policies that are flexible and adaptable . Before creating an index, however, a clear and compelling conceptual and theoretical framework for vulnerability needs to be developed. This first stage of this development should focus on exploring and evaluating approaches, fundamental concepts, and relevant theoretical frameworks for understanding vulnerability, as well as on conceptualizing the structure and composition of the complex system being analyzed . The vulnerable entity or system’s boundaries are typically difficult to define accurately. In part, this difficulty arises from the desire to measure the vulnerability of entire countries or complex systems. But even when the vulnerability assessment is restricted to a local scale, the system/entity interacts with a vast array of institutional, economic, political, and social contexts, which creates uncertain boundaries . After a conceptual framework is chosen, a well-defined spatial scale and scope of analysis is required. Applying an index to different spatial scales may result in different vulnerability patterns . Scale is related to the resolution that is available for the data. Although scale is important, however, selecting indicators to make up your index is a greater challenge in the vulnerability community. Indicators are useful in simplifying a system’s complexity, but as we have noted, they need to be used with caution when operationalizing vulnerability. Different approaches are taken to choosing indicators. Deductive arguments use a top-down approach to select indicators a-priori based on a theoretical framework. Inductive, bottom-up, approaches are data-based; they start with a larger set of indicators which are reduced by using either factor analysis or principal components analysis . This inductive approach is good for data reduction, but its subjectivity at critical stages contributes to uncertainty .