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Social vulnerability, security and environmental change

Dr. Neil Adger and Dr. Mick Kelly, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

Abstract of paper presented at the conference Environmental Change and Vulnerability: Lessons from Vietnam and the Indochina Region, Hanoi, Vietnam, April 4-5th 1998.


Assessing the future impact of global environmental change is an uncertain business. There are many scientific unknowns and the social and economic trends which will determine humanity's effect on the environment cannot be predicted with accuracy. This uncertainty leaves policy makers in a difficult position. No firm assessment does not mean that the risk is minimal and can be ignored, and it is in the nature of the problem that unpreparedness itself increases vulnerability substantially.

What can be done to plan for an uncertain future?

To ensure security in the face of environmental change?

How can policy makers, short of financial and human resources in the present-day, justify committing those limited resources to an uncertain threat that may be decades in the future?

We argue that a precautionary approach to impact mitigation and adaptation must involve identifying "win-win" situations in which action to reduce future risk also minimizes vulnerability to global change, to other environmental problems, or to social and economic threats in the present-day.

Elsewhere, we have examined one such approach to coastal protection which takes advantage of a natural resource found along much of the coastline of Vietnam, the mangrove ecosystem. By quantifying the economic benefits of mangrove rehabilitation undertaken, inter alia, to enhance sea defence systems in three coastal Districts of northern Vietnam, we show that mangrove rehabilitation can be desirable from an economic perspective based solely on the direct use benefits by local communities. Such activities have even higher benefit cost ratios with the inclusion of the indirect benefits resulting from the avoided maintenance cost for the sea dike system which the mangrove stands protect from coastal storm surges.

A full assessment of the consequences of global environmental change for human well-being requires evaluation of the manner in which society is likely to respond to the initial signs of impacts — or to the perception of coming impacts. Social and biophysical systems react to change through adaptation. In the case of social systems, these reactions may be involuntary, spontaneous responses or they can be deliberate, adaptive strategies.

The objective of this paper is to outline a conceptual model of social vulnerability to environmental change as the first step in appraising and understanding the social and economic processes that shape the adaptive response.

Vulnerability as defined here pertains explicitly to individuals and social groups. It is the state of individuals, of groups, of communities defined in terms of their ability to cope with and adapt to any external stress placed on their livelihoods and well-being. We emphasise vulnerability to short-term hazards and extremes (in the climate context, flood and drought, cyclone and heatwave) as it is these events that populations first and foremost experience and react to. Moreover, it is through the varying character of these events that any long-term change in climate will first be manifest.

What is the value of studying social vulnerability? This approach provides, we would argue, a robust, policy-relevant rationale for impact assessment. It recognises that society is continually responding to environmental stress and evolving such responses. The response to long-term environmental change is facilitated and constrained by the same architecture of entitlements as adaptation to other, more immediate social and environmental stresses. To learn about that hypothetical, future response, then, the place to start is in the present day: by studying the processes which shape the adaptive response to current events; and by identifying those processes which reduce or heighten vulnerability to present environmental stress.

From a policy perspective, this approach does amount to identifying win-win situations in which action to limit current vulnerability will, in itself, improve resilience in the face of long-term climate change. The effect of limited scientific understanding and the myriad problems confronting any attempt to estimate the social and economic future are minimised by rooting the analysis in study of present-day conditions rather than the uncertain future.


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