Vulnerability and Impact

Question 1

Defining vulnerability - Cutter (1996)

Answer 1

“a potential for loss”. Individual, social, biophysical. Intellectual variety.”

Question 2

Defining vulnerability - Adger (2006)

Answer 2

“the degree to which a system is susceptible to and is unable to cope with adverse effects”. System vulnerability – Level of stress, sensitivity to stress and capacity to cope

Question 3

Vulnerability in relation to political economy of resource use

Answer 3

“vulnerability to environmental change does not exist in isolation from the wider political economy of resource use. Vulnerability is driven by inadvertent or deliberate human action that reinforces self-interest and the distribution of power in addition to interacting with physical and ecological systems” (Adger, 2007)

Question 4

UN’s International Decade of Natural Disaster reduction (IDNDR)

Answer 4

Vulnerability assessments are used to determine the potential damage and loss of life from extreme natural events

Question 5

Social vulnerability

Answer 5

Includes the susceptibility of social groups, or society at large to potential losses from hazard events and disasters. (Cutter, 1996)

Question 6

Vulnerability and biophysical hazard

Answer 6

There is a potential for loss derived from the interaction of society with biophysical conditions which in turn affect the resilience of the environment to respond to the hazard ot disaster as well as influencing the adaptation of society to such changing conditions (Cutter, 1996)

Question 7

Vulnerability as pre-existing condition

Answer 7

These studies are characterised by a focus on the distribution of some hazardous condition, the human occupancy of this hazardous zone, and the degree of loss associated with the occurrence of a particular event (Cutter, 1996)

Question 8

Vulnerability as a tempered response

Answer 8

This focuses on coping responses including societal resistance and resilience to hazards. The nature of the hazardous event is usually taken as a given, or viewed as a social construct. This then highlights the social construction of vulnerability - a condition rooted in historical, cultural, social and economic processes that impinge on the individual’s or society’s ability to cope with disasters and respond (Cutter, 1996)

Question 9

Vulnerability as a hazard of place

Answer 9

Vulnerability is conceived as both a biophysical risk as well as a social response, but within a specific areal or geographic domain - this can be geographic space where vulnerable people and places are located , or social space, who in those places are most vulnerable (Cutter, 1996)

Question 10

Measuring vulnerability (Cutter, 1996)

Answer 10

Variables related to exposure normally include proximity to the source of threat, incident frequency or probability, magnitude, duration or spatial impact.

Question 11

Blaikie et al (1994)

Answer 11

Examined causality using 2 alternative models: the pressure release model (PAR) and access to resources model. The PAR model provides an explanation of the relationship between processes that give rise to ‘unsafe conditions’ and their intersection with some type of hazard or disaster event creating a form of social vulnerability. The access to resources model is a more refined explanation of the role of political and economic forces as the root cause of the unsafe conditions

Question 12

OAS (1991)

Answer 12

Developed a series of multihazard maps that incorporate vulnerability assessments into their preimpact planning and mitigation efforts - these assessments include human populations, critical facilities and lifelines, economic production facilities and differences in vulnerability among economic sectors.

Question 13

Risk is (Cutter, 1996)

Answer 13

The likelihood of occurrence (or probability) of a hazard and has two domains: the potential sources of risk and the contextual nature of the risk itself. Risks combine with mitigation to create an overall hazard potential.

Question 14

Vulnerability was traditionally viewed as

Answer 14

Either a pre-existing condition or potential exposure to a risk (biophysical) or as a social condition predisposing some reponse to an environmental threat (social vulnerability). (Cutter, 1996)

Question 15

Hazards of place model

Answer 15

Can facilitate a single of multihazards approach with differing hazard characteristics and diverse methodological approaches. (Cutter, 1996)

Question 16

Social science of vulnerability

Answer 16

1 - The ‘Natural Hazards’ approach:
- Vulnerability as likelihood vs impact
- Simple potential for loss, based on the risk
2 – Vulnerability as pre-existing condition: hazard-occupancy-event-loss. Basic understanding of social conditions.
Example – mapping vulnerability
3a – Vulnerability as ‘tempered response’:
- Societal ‘resistance’ and ‘resilience’
- Focuses on chronic and embedded conditions
- Social construction and the role of political ecology
4 - Vulnerability of place (spatial and social)
- Pre existing social conditions of places –geographically centred.

Question 17

Influences of vulnerability

Answer 17

Cutter et al’s (2003) influences on social vulnerability: socio-economic status, gender, race, ethnicity, family status, education, social dependence, infrastructure, employment etc

Question 18

Influences of vulnerability: space and time

Answer 18

“…contributing components in the lower Mississippi Valley counties were race and socioeconomic status; along the Texas-Mexico border counties, it was ethnicity and poverty, whereas in the Great Plains counties, it was a combination of economic dependence and an ageing population brought on by depopulation. The overall result was a distinct geography of social vulnerability to natural hazards” (Cutter and Finch, 2008)

Question 19

Beyond vulnerability

Answer 19

Bankoff (2001:27) “The concept of natural disasters forms part of a much wider historical and cultural geography of risk that both creates and maintains a particular depiction of large parts of the world as dangerous places for us and ours”

Question 20

Bankoff (2001) critique

Answer 20

Level of detail, cultural diversity, social practices, coping strategies

Question 21

Social impacts of natural hazards

Answer 21

• Disruption to home, disruption to family life, material recovery process.
• Tunstall et al’s (2006) health impacts: Immediate (injuries, health conditions)
• Physical health affects after flooding
• Psychological and post-traumatic stress effects.

Question 22

Linking vulnerability to resilience

Answer 22

“To some extent ‘resilience’ can be considered as the flip-side to vulnerability – for example, we might say a ‘resilient community’ is less vulnerable” (Whittle et al, 2010)

Question 23

Engineering resilience

Answer 23

Associated with the mathematical ecology is an abstract variable - simply the time it takes for a system to return to a stable maximum after a disturbance (Walker and Cooper, 2011)

Question 24

Ecological resilience

Answer 24

the complex biotic interactions that determine the relationships within a system’ “To some extent ‘resilience’ can be considered as the flip-side to vulnerability – for example, we might say a ‘resilient community’ is less vulnerable” (Whittle et al, 2010)

Question 25

Resilience is… (Holling, 1973)

Answer 25

‘a measure of the ability of these systems to absorb changes to state variables, driving variables and parameters and still persist’

Question 26

MacKinnon and Derickson (2012) three criticisms of Walker and Cooper (2011)

Answer 26

Ecological concept of resilience is conservative when applied to social relations. Resilience is externally defined by state agencies and expert knowledge. A concern with the resilience of places is misplaced in terms of spatial scale since the processes which shape resilience operate at the scale of capitalist social relations

Question 27

Cova et al (2011) - Wildfire vulnerability

Answer 27

In most cases housing units are added to fire-prone canyons and hillsides without improving the road infrastructure. This means that although new roads may be added to a community to support the development of additional homes, an improvement in the number, direction, and capacity of the primary exits is much less common (Cova et al., 2011)

Question 28

Collins and Bolin (2009) - At the household level

Answer 28

Conflicting environmental values, reliance on fire insurance and firefighting institutions, lack of place dependency etc.

Question 29

Collins and Bolin (2009) - At the regional scale

Answer 29

Shift from a rescue extraction to environmental amenity based economy has transformed ecological communities, produced unequal social distributions of risk and shaped people’s social and environmental interactions

Question 30

Collins and Bolin (2009) - Tension

Answer 30

Social tension between locals and amenity migrants. The tension dissolved in the 2002 Rodes-Chediski fire and then reemerged due to divergent responses to withdfire haxards

Question 31

Collins and Bolin (2009) - Wildfire risk present before

Answer 31

Through interviews and participant observations we found that many land spectators ignored acute wildfire hazards on their properties since they reside elsewhere

Question 32

Cutter et al (2010) Analysed

Answer 32

To determine biophysical vulnerability, they analysed those hazardous events, both natural and technological, that are likely to occur in a specific geographic area.

Question 33

Cutter et al (2010) - found

Answer 33

In combining biophysical and social vulnerability, we found a high degree of spatial vulnerability in overall hazard vulnerability in Georgetown County. The most vulnerable places do not always overlap with the most vulnerable populations.

Question 34

Schulte and Miller (2010) Examine

Answer 34

The sensitivity of behaviours and attitudes regarding wildfire risk to perceptions of drought and climate change impacts documenting homeowner risk mitigation effort in Clear Creek County, Colorado

Question 35

Schulte and Miller (2010) shows

Answer 35

That a well educated sample has a fairly accurate understanding of the impact of climate change and other environmental risk factors and awareness of climate change was high but while many people link climate/weather impacts on mitigation motivation, this variable is only marginally significant.