Integrated multi-scalar analysis of vulnerability to environmental hazards: Assessing extreme flooding in western Amazonia     

《Global Environmental Change》2022

Environmental change is significantly altering hydrological systems worldwide, with substantial impacts for the people who live on floodplains and depend on rivers for their livelihoods and lifeways. Amazonia is a region significantly affected by these changes, particularly more severe flooding. This paper proposes a multi-scalar approach to vulnerability, applying it empirically to the analysis of household vulnerability to the 2011 flood—the second largest flood event along the Ucayali River in 30 years—in terms of exposure, impacts, and responses. Locally relevant indicators for assets, social identity, and social networks at the community and household levels are used to examine their role in shaping flood vulnerability, the interplay of community-level and household-level factors, and differential vulnerability across exposure, impacts, and responses to the same hazard event. We find that the most common impacts of severe flooding in rural Amazonia are on agriculture and that fishing is the dominant response strategy. This study suggests that covariate shocks, like floods, can have distinct idiosyncratic impacts and responses among households. We demonstrate that more integrated approaches to vulnerability analysis offer potential for better understanding differential vulnerabilities within populations as well as for drawing comparisons across hazard events and different settings.  相似文献   

Situated adaptation: Tackling the production of vulnerability through transformative action in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone     

《Global Environmental Change》2021

Drawing attention to the production of vulnerability across scales in Sri Lanka, we contribute to knowledge of why certain people and social groups are vulnerable. We build our contribution on the theoretical application of ‘situated adaptation’. A situated analytical approach identifies, assesses, and responds to the everyday realities and politics of those living in climate changed environments. It highlights uneven geographies of vulnerability and opportunity, while identifying new imaginations and possibilities for transformative action that counter the production of vulnerability. We illustrate the utility of ‘situated adaptation’ by filling an empirical gap relating to experiences of political-economic and environmental change in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone. We detail situated experiences by drawing on field research in the Anuradhapura District, revealing how the lives and livelihoods of farmer participants are structured by a productivity-vulnerability paradox. We demonstrate how a prevalent adaptation-development paradigm (whereby development and adaptation programs co-exist in theory and practice) is unable to address the structural drivers of vulnerability in Sri Lanka’s Dry Zone. A situated adaptation approach both explains why this is the case and highlights opportunities for alternative transformative actions, potentially identifying a more democratic and egalitarian politics of co-determining socionatural change.  相似文献   

Responding to change: Using scenarios to understand how socioeconomic factors may influence amplifying or dampening exploitation feedbacks among Tanzanian fishers     

Joshua.E. Cinner  Carl. Folke  Tim. Daw  Christina.C. Hicks   《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(1):7-12

Environmental change often requires societies to adapt. In some instances, these adaptations can create feedbacks that amplify the change. Alternatively, other adaptations may dampen the change. We used semi-structured interviews with 240 fishers from nine Tanzanian coastal communities to explore responses to four hypothetical scenarios of increasingly severe declines in their average catch (10%, 20%, 30% and 50%). Overall, a higher proportion of fishers said they would respond to decline using amplifying adaptations (such as fishing harder) than dampening adaptations (such as reducing effort), particularly in the scenarios with lower levels of decline. We used a redundancy analysis to explore whether certain types of responses were related to the fishers’ socioeconomic characteristics. Fishers that would employ amplifying responses had greater economic wealth but lacked options. Fishers who would adopt dampening responses possessed characteristics associated with having livelihood options. Fishers who would adopt neither amplifying nor dampening responses were less likely to belong to community groups and sold the largest proportion of their catch. This study provides novel contributions by differentiating aspects of adaptive capacity that will amplify versus dampen environmental change and by highlighting what the resource users’ themselves say regarding responding to environmental change. Although direct policy application is limited by the study's hypothetical scenario nature, it provides a good beginning to incorporating resource users’ voices into such policy discussions.  相似文献   

Testing resilience thinking in a poverty context: Experience from the Niger River basin     

Christophe Béné  Louisa Evans  David Mills  Solomon Ovie  Aminu Raji  Ahmadu Tafida  Amaga Kodio  Famory Sinaba  Pierre Morand  Jacques Lemoalle  Neil Andrew 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(4):1173-1184

Resilience thinking is an important addition to the range of frameworks and approaches that can be used to understand and manage complex social–ecological systems like small-scale fisheries. However, it is yet to lead to better environmental or development outcomes for fisheries stakeholders in terms of food security, improved livelihoods and ecological sustainability. This paper takes an empirical approach by focusing on the fundamentals of resilience thinking to evaluate its usefulness in developing relevant management interventions in small-scale fisheries in the Niger River Basin in West Africa. The paper presents the outputs of a participatory assessment exercise where both fishery communities and local experts were involved at two different scales. The resilience frame used was designed to facilitate the identification of socially defined thresholds that help delineate the desirability of the current system configuration and provides a diagnosis framework that tailors management solutions to problems in local context. The analysis highlights some key contributions from resilience thinking to the challenge of diagnosis in small-scale fisheries management in developing countries, as well as important contributions that emerge from taking a pragmatic and critical approach to its application.  相似文献   

“Indicators of vulnerability and adaptive capacity”: Towards a clarification of the science–policy interface     

Jochen Hinkel   《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(1):198-208

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Virtue and vulnerability: Discourses on women, gender and climate change   总被引：1，自引：0，他引：1  

Seema Arora-Jonsson 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(2):744-751

In the limited literature on gender and climate change, two themes predominate - women as vulnerable or virtuous in relation to the environment. Two viewpoints become obvious: women in the South will be affected more by climate change than men in those countries and that men in the North pollute more than women. The debates are structured in specific ways in the North and the South and the discussion in the article focuses largely on examples from Sweden and India. The article traces the lineage of the arguments to the women, environment and development discussions, examining how they recur in new forms in climate debates. Questioning assumptions about women's vulnerability and virtuousness, it highlights how a focus on women's vulnerability or virtuousness can deflect attention from inequalities in decision-making. By reiterating statements about poor women in the South and the pro-environmental women of the North, these assumptions reinforce North-South biases. Generalizations about women's vulnerability and virtuousness can lead to an increase in women's responsibility without corresponding rewards. There is need to contextualise debates on climate change to enable action and to respond effectively to its adverse effects in particular places.  相似文献   

Governing resilience building in Thailand's tourism-dependent coastal communities: Conceptualising stakeholder agency in social-ecological systems     

Rasmus Klocker Larsen  Emma CalgaroFrank Thomalla 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(2):481-491

In current scientific efforts to harness complementarity between resilience and vulnerability theory, one response is an ‘epistemological shift’ towards an evolutionary, learning based conception of the ‘systems-actor’ relation in social-ecological systems. In this paper, we contribute to this movement regarding the conception of stakeholder agency within social-ecological systems. We examine primary evidence from the governance of post-disaster recovery and disaster risk reduction efforts in Thailand's coastal tourism-dependent communities following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Through an emerging storyline from stakeholders, we construct a new framework for conceptualising stakeholder agency in social-ecological systems, which positions the notion of resilience within a conception of governance as a negotiated normative process. We conclude that if resilience theory is proposed as the preferred approach by which disaster risk reduction is framed and implemented, it needs to acknowledge much more explicitly the role of stakeholder agency and the processes through which legitimate visions of resilience are generated.  相似文献   

Temporal vulnerability in hazardscapes: Flood memory-networks and referentiality along the North Carolina Neuse River (USA)     

Daniel H. de Vries   《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(1):154-164

Social models of population vulnerability to disasters increasingly include the notion that vulnerability has a strong temporal component. While this temporality is typically conceptualized as objective (making vulnerability “dynamic,” “multiscalar,” and/or “historical”), it consistently fails to acknowledge that among stakeholders managing hazardscapes temporality is also a social process in which subjective experience of time may play a role in creating situations of population vulnerability. This paper proposes that the temporal situatedness of a population relative to past hazard events and the quality with which stakeholders engage hazard memory-chains combine to significantly influences its vulnerability to natural hazards. It is proposed that this temporal vulnerability is characterized by shared, population level potential for surprise and can be evaluated by exploration of time-series depth and temporal reference points in historical ecological narratives and documents. Based on ethnohistoric research conducted from 2002 to 2006 in flood-prone eastern North Carolina (USA), it is illustrated how temporal vulnerability was relatively higher in the Neuse River watershed located at the City of Kinston than surrounding watersheds. Due to the combination of factors including the damming of the Neuse River in the 1980s, outdated official floodplain maps, relatively unmonitored floodplain development, the stochastic timing of flood events (placing the last major flood more than a generation away), technological optimism, and turnover of floodplain officials and residents, local stakeholders were seriously misinformed about the space-time risks involved both before and after the disaster of Hurricane Floyd (1999) happened. To deal with this inconsistency, the temporal rarity of Hurricane Floyd as a “500-year event” has been motivated and embraced by many in an effort to continue life-as-is. The paper proposes that the concept of temporal vulnerability is further explored and used as key dimension in the vulnerability sciences.  相似文献   

Classifying knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in Europe for informing adaptation research and decision-making: A conceptual meta-analysis   总被引：3，自引：0，他引：3  

Mareen E. Hofmann  Jochen HinkelMarkus Wrobel 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(3):1106-1116

Knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability is fragmented, because it is found in disparate case studies which use inconsistent terminology and focus on distinct aspects relevant to adaptation. While large-scale syntheses such as the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provide a high level overview and are useful for international decision-making, there is a need for systematic and flexible access to this research-based knowledge in order to aid future adaptation research and decision-making. Against this background, we present a ‘conceptual’ meta-analysis, a novel approach to meta-analyse studies on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability in Europe. The meta-analysis results in a classification scheme for relating the diverse studies. This scheme consists of (i) a classification of studies according to the type of adaptation-relevant results they produce and (ii) a hierarchical classification of the regional and thematic context of studies. The implementation of this scheme, for example in the form of a database, overcomes some of the identified gaps of current adaptation knowledge representation. We furthermore present a quantitative analysis of the classified studies that exemplifies how the developed classification scheme can be applied to get a systematic and quantitative overview of the knowledge they contain. Thus, the conceptual meta-analysis and the classification scheme represent a first step towards a systematisation of knowledge on climate change impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability and may be seen as a useful complement to qualitative literature reviews.  相似文献   

Co-management and the co-production of knowledge: Learning to adapt in Canada's Arctic   总被引：3，自引：0，他引：3  

Derek Armitage  Fikret BerkesAaron Dale  Erik Kocho-SchellenbergEva Patton 《Global Environmental Change》2011,21(3):995-1004

Co-management institutional arrangements have an important role in creating conditions for social learning and adaptation in a rapidly changing Arctic environment, although how that works in practice has not been clearly articulated. This paper draws on three co-management cases from the Canadian Arctic to examine the role of knowledge co-production as an institutional trigger or mechanism to enable learning and adapting. Experience with knowledge co-production across the three cases is variable but outcomes illustrate how co-management actors are learning to learn through uncertainty and environmental change, or learning to be adaptive. Policy implications of this analysis are highlighted and include the importance of a long-term commitment to institution building, an enabling policy environment to sustain difficult social processes associated with knowledge co-production, and the value of diverse modes of communication, deliberation and social interaction.  相似文献