Climate Vulnerability and Adaption Flashcards
What is vulnerability?
- Predisposition to be adversely affected. Encompasses a variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt (IPCC, 2013)
- Physical environments vulnerable to climate change
What is outcome framing?
- End-point approach takes any consequences that remain after adaption has taken place define levels of vulnerability
- Linear result of project impacts of climate change
- Problem: human impacts on Earth’s climate system
- Boundaries: ‘nature’ distinct from society’
- One system is affecting the other
- Discourse: vulnerability is a scientifically measurable
- Outcome of exposure to climate risks
O’Brien et al., 2007
What is contextual framing?
- Starting point approach considers vulnerability as present inability to cope with external pressures
- ‘Wounded soldier’ approach, addressing present-day vulnerability will reduce vulnerability under future climate conditions (Kelly and Adger, 2000)
- Problem: transformation of Earth system with uneven outcomes
- Boundaries: ‘nature’ and ‘society’ are integrated
- Discourse: vulnerability as a human security issue…
- Uneven social and natural systems and exposure to multiple types of risk
- Not just climate risks
O’Brien et al., 2007
Why can’t contextual and outcome framing be joined?
As they are rooted in different discourses
How do contextual and outcome framing compliment each other?
- Human-security framing of climate change has been far less visible in international scientific and policy debates and addressing this with a complementary approach would broad scope of adaption policies
O’Brien et al. (2013)
What is the biophysical vulnerability in regard to environmental change?
- Environmental degradation creates negative impacts
- Fits norms of hazards and climate research
- Actors are treated as passive victims that are treated as exogenous to society
- Rests on expert knowledge and technological solutions that sidestep the inherently political and moral questions
McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008
What is the human ecology vulnerability in regard to environmental change?
- Too much change affects human-environment adjustments
- Allows for multiple scales and types of coping with change
McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008
What is the political economy vulnerability in regard to environmental change?
- Inequality creates disproportionate impact on poor
- Identifies structural conditions affecting vulnerability
- Structural dynamics of capitalism to environmental degradation
- Fails into the trap of essentialism –> categorical definitions
McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008
What is the constructivist vulnerability in regard to environmental change?
- vulnerability tied to human agency and culture
- Reveals role of human agency in response to risk
- Nominalism approach that treat categories as artefacts of the human mind –> lump nature into history
McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008
What is the political ecology vulnerability to environmental change?
- Physical and social risks independent but interrelated
- Nature independent (unlike political economy), risks still given cultural expression
- Lack clear conceptual mechanism for connecting patterns in diversity of the social over space and time to changes in relevant environments
McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008
What do McLaughlin and Dietz (2008) note about the 6 different vulnerabilities to environmental change?
None of the framings give proper weight to role of social structure, human agency and the environment in either producing or mitigating vulnerability
