Social vulnerability in three high-poverty climate change hot spots: What does the climate change literature tell us? (original) (raw)
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Providing sound evidence to inform decision making that considers the needs of the most vulnerable to climate change will help both adaptation and development efforts. Such evidence is particularly important in climate change ‘‘hot spots’’, where strong climate signal and high concentrations of vulnerable people are present. These hot spots include semiarid regions and deltas of Africa and Asia, and glacier- and snowpack-dependent river basins of South Asia. In advance of a major research effort focusing on these three hot spots, studies were commissioned to identify and characterize the current status of knowledge in each on biophysical impacts, social vulnerability, and adaptation policy and practice. The resulting seven papers are brought together in this special edition, with this editorial introduction providing background on these hot spots, the program through which the studies were commissioned, and an overview of the papers that follow.
Explaining differential vulnerability to climate change: A social science review
WIREs Climate Change
The varied effects of recent extreme weather events around the world exemplify the uneven impacts of climate change on populations, even within relatively small geographic regions. Differential human vulnerability to environmental hazards results from a range of social, economic, historical, and political factors, all of which operate at multiple scales. While adaptation to climate change has been the dominant focus of policy and research agendas, it is essential to ask as well why some communities and peoples are disproportionately exposed to and affected by climate threats. The cases and synthesis presented here are organized around four key themes (resource access, governance, culture, and knowledge), which we approach from four social science fields (cultural anthropology, archaeology, human geography, and sociology). Social scientific approaches to human vulnerability draw vital attention to the root causes of climate change threats and the reasons that people are forced to adapt to them. Because vulnerability is a multidimensional process rather than an unchanging state, a dynamic social approach to vulnerability is most likely to improve mitigation and adaptation planning efforts.
Climate change and poverty in Africa: Mapping hotspots of vulnerability
2008
Climate change and increasing climate variability threaten the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), and some of the worst effects on human health and agriculture will be in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in vulnerable regions. The relationships between climate change and the vulnerability of resource-poor croppers and livestock keepers and their resilience to current and future climate variability need to be better understood. This paper describes the generation of information that combines projected climate change in agricultural systems with vulnerability data. The results of the analysis, in terms of vulnerable people particularly at risk for deleterious effects of climate change, are being used for impact assessment, targeting and priority setting, to help identify locations for specific research and adaptation activities. Given the heterogeneity in households' access to resources, poverty levels and ability to cope, vulnerability assessments need to be done at the sub-national level to help improve the adaptive capacity and coping strategies of highly vulnerable households.
It is increasingly clear that climate variability and change is a reality that brings huge consequences to both human environment and livelihood. In the light of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projection for severe and extreme weather conditions in the 21st Century, the author identifies climate change as a phenomenon that brings severe consequences to both human environment and livelihood. The inadequacies of tackling the problem in developing countries are emphasized as dependent on several biophysical and socio-economic processes. The paper is aimed at showing how climate and human systems influence the level of vulnerability and adaptation to climate change based on a theoretical climate change vulnerability framework by proposing the identification of determinants of vulnerability as basic that can facilitate the understanding of the dynamics of vulnerability and the timely incorporation of adaptation strategies into developmental policies.
Assessing current social vulnerability to climate change: A participatory methodology
2015
to analyze the current vulnerability of local communities to climate variability in the context of development processes. This assessment forms the basis for further research on future scenarios of vulnerability and the evaluation of possible adaptation strategies that can provide co-benefits with mitigation efforts in the Congo Basin. The methodology for the regional assessment was developed in collaboration with many partners. Researchers from CIFOR and SEI worked closely with local partners in each site to refine and apply the different methods of the assessment. We would like to thank all local partners: ROSE, INDEFOR, ARECO, AMFN and UEFA. We are also very grateful to all the local communities in the research sites that took part in this research for their time and interest in the research; they really deserve to be coauthors, because we are sharing their knowledge in this report. Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) CIFOR advances human well-being, environmental conservation and equity by conducting research to help shape policies and practices that affect forests in developing countries. CIFOR is a member of the CGIAR Consortium. Our headquarters are in Bogor, Indonesia, with offices in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Climatic Change, 2014
This paper discusses the role and relevance of the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) and the new scenarios that combine SSPs with representative concentration pathways (RCPs) for climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability (IAV) research. It first provides an overview of uses of social–environmental scenarios in IAV studies and identifies the main shortcomings of earlier such scenarios. Second, the paper elaborates on two aspects of the SSPs and new scenarios that would improve their usefulness for IAV studies compared to earlier scenario sets: (i) enhancing their applicability while retaining coherence across spatial scales, and (ii) adding indicators of importance for projecting vulnerability. The paper therefore presents an agenda for future research, recommending that SSPs incorporate not only the standard variables of population and gross domestic product, but also indicators such as income distribution, spatial population, human health and governance.