Vulnerability Formalisation Workshop
The notion of “vulnerability” is not well-defined in the climate change scientific community. Recent research has identified a need for formalisation, which would support accurate communication and the elimination of misunderstandings that result from the use of ambiguous terminology. Moreover, formalisations of vulnerability are a prerequisite for computational approaches to its assessment. We therefore invite for the first workshop of vulnerability formalisation in Potsdam. We present the current version of a formal framework of vulnerability that is being
developed in the ADAM Workpackage A1 at PIK. But we will also have a look at formal approaches to vulnerability by other researchers from different domains.
Workshop dates
13-14 September 2007, as part of the ADAM week.Registration
Participants from ADAM should register here for the ADAM week. Participants from outside ADAM are registered by us.Workshop place
Potsdam, Germany, at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Information about the Location.Participants
- The FAVAIA-Team from PIK, led by Cezar Ionescu and Jochen Hinkel, who are Authors of the paper "Towards a formal framework of vulnerability to climate change." which is submitted to Environmental Modeling and Assessment.
- Richard Klein, a senior research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute and co-author of the paper mentioned above.
- Paul Flondor, Professor at University Politehnica of Bucharest, faculty of automatic control and computers.
- Gilberto C. Gallopín, Regional Adviser on Environmental Policies at the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago, Chile.
- The ADAM-A1-Workpackage.
Main Goals
- The first goal is to disseminate the ideas, methods and tools that we have developed in the context of the formal framework to the other ADAM participants. This will involve giving presentations of our framework that range from the very technical to the very practical, depending on the audience. We would alos like to collect some feedback from vulnerability experts to test and improve our framework.
- The second goal is to find out about other formalisations of vulnerability and related issues, e.g. adaptive capacity or measuring vulnerability. We would like to have presentations from external experts, and we expect to have discussions with them.
- We also expect to be challenged about pragmatic aspects, e.g. how can our formalisation help actual assessments. There should be enough time to discuss these issues within the workshop.
- Our last goal is a presentation of Meta-analysis methods and how they are related to formalisation. This has applications within the ADAM-project.
Agenda
On both days we will have a couple of presentations, everyone with a following disscusion.The presentations:
Thursday, September 13th, starting at 10.00 am:
1. G. Gallopin, "Towards formalization: conceptual relations between vulnerability and related concepts".
2. Cezar Ionescu, "A formal framework for vulnerability in the context of Climate Change"
3. Saskia Werners, "Adaptive Capacity".
Friday, September 14th, starting at 10.00 am:
4. Diana Reckien, "Meta-analysis of the impacts and vulnerabilites of Europe to Climate Change: Systematisation and Coding"
5. P. Flondor, "Modal Logics and Vulnerability"
