Defining Vulnerability, resilience, risk

Presentation outline

Dr. Arjumand NizamiPhoto: Intercooperation Pakistan by Tahir Saleem

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Outline

•About the regional project in Pakistan

•Definitional issues

•Vulnerability context analysis / assessment

•Challenges

The term

(Brutschin and Wiesmann 2002).

• Latin vulnus: “a wound” • Vulnerare: “to wound” • Vulnerabilis: soldier lying wounded on the battlefield

Vulnerability (IPPC)

• Vulnerability – the degree to which an exposed unit is susceptible to

harm due to a perturbation or stress, and the ability (or lack thereof) of

the exposed unit to cope, recover, or fundamentally adapt (become a

new system or become extinct). It can also be considered as the

underlying exposure to damaging shocks, perturbations or stresses,

rather than the probability or projected incidence impacts of those

shocks themselves.

• A shorter version: Vulnerability is the degree to which a system is

susceptible to, or unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change,

including climate variability and extremes.

Other definitions• Defencelessness, insecurity, and exposure to risk, shocks and stress. Exposure

to contingencies and stress, and difficulty in coping with them. Vulnerability has thus two sides:

• an external side of risks, shocks, and stress to which an individual or household is subject;

• internal side which is defencelessness, meaning a lack of means to cope without damaging loss.

• Insecurity and sensitivity in the well-being of individuals, households and communities in the face of a changing environment and implicit in this, their responsiveness and resilience to risks that they face during such negative changes. (Moser 1998)

• Interface between exposure to the physical threats to human well-being and the capacity of people and communities to cope with those threats. (UNEP 2002)

• Degree to which an exposure unit and its attendant human-environment system is harmed due to exposure to a perturbation or stress. (White 1974 ; Turner et al. 2002)

Coordinates of vulnerability

• Vulnerability is the function of (Polsky et al. 2003):• Character, magnitude, and rate of climate change to which its exposed • Sensitivity and adaptive capacity of system itself

• Vulnerability can be exacerbated by non-climatic stresses, e.g., Poverty, Food Security, Conflicts, Incidence of diseases such as HIV, AIDS, unequal access to resources, economic globalization, etc. (UNISDR)

• There are three basic co-ordinates of vulnerability (Watts and Bohle 1993): • The Risk of exposure to crises, stress and shocks (exposure); • The risk of inadequate capacities to cope with stress, Crises and shocks

(capacity); • The risk of severe consequences of, and the attendant risks of slow or limited

poverty (resiliency) from, crises, risk and shocks (potentiality).

• Vulnerability baseline includes a description of current vulnerabilities to climate variability and events.

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Resilience

• The ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions. (UNISDR 2007) . This is determined by the degree to which the social system is capable of organizing itself to increase its capacity learning from past disasters for better future protection and improve prevention measures.

• Resilience is the capability of a system to return after deflection or perturbation to a stable overall or local state of equilibrium (also termed elasticity). (WBGU 2000)

• The resilience of social-ecological systems has three defining characteristics: i) the amount of change the system can undergo and still retain essentially the same structure, function, identity, and feedbacks on function and structure, ii) the degree to which the system is capable of self-organisation, and iii) the degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation. (Quinlan 2003)

Resilience…cont..

• Degree to which a system rebounds, recoups, or recovers from a stimulus. (Smit et al. 1999)

• The ability to persist and the ability to adapt. (Adger 2003)

• How systems responds [adjustments and adaptability]. (Turner et al. 2002)

• It characterizes a system’s ability to bounce back to a reference state after a disturbance and the capacity of a system to maintain certain structures and functions despite disturbance. (Turner et al. 2003)

• The ability of a system to absorb perturbations or stresses without changes in its fundamental structure and function that would drive the system into a different state (or extinction). (White 1974 ; Turner et al. 2002)

Risk..

• Risk: The probability of harmful consequences, or expected losses

(deaths, injuries, property, livelihoods, economic activity disrupted or

environment damaged) resulting from interactions between natural or

human induced hazards and vulnerable conditions. Conventionally risk

is expressed by the notation Risk = Hazards x Vulnerability. (UNISDR

2004)

Risk Assessment includes…

•What are the hazards? •What are the vulnerabilities?

• What are the capacities?

Disaster Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability

Capacity

Social, cultural, physical, geographical, economic factors

Disaster management systems (early warning & monitoring, disaster response, disaster recovery and reconstruction) and institutions

Risk analysis

Vulnerability Assessment in Pakistan

•CRiSTAL

•Other options for vulnerability context analysis / assessment

• Integrating vulnerability in development planning (examples from Water for Livelihoods Project, SDC)

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