Preston and Stafford-Smith (2009) distinguish between
“present vulnerability” and “future
vulnerability”, each comprising biophysical and social
determinants. To avoid using the term present vulnerability, given that
vulnerability refers to potential harm in the future, we have modified
their schema to refer to vulnerability to climate variability and
vulnerability to climate change (Figure 3-5), which recognises that
there are two different time horizons of interest in framing
vulnerability, especially with respect to the implementation of
adaptation responses.
Figure 3-5: Current and future
determinants of vulnerability to climate variability and climate
change (modified from Preston and Stafford-Smith, 2009). A notable gap
in knowledge relates
to adaptation that targets future changes in social determinants of
vulnerability.
It has been argued that adaptations that are robust under projected
biophysical changes will also be robust for existing vulnerabilities
(sometimes known as no regret or low regret measures –
Willows and Connell, 2003: Uncertainty, and Decision-making). On the
other hand, it is also argued that present-day social determinants of
vulnerability should guide adaptation, and that such interventions will
then drive future development pathways that are also less vulnerable to
climate change. This tendency to superimpose projected exposure on
current adaptive capacity also reflects international funding goals,
which have tended to target capacities to cope with climatic conditions
experienced today, rather than projected longer-term climate change.
Interestingly, future socio-economic changes are rarely explored as a
guide for targeting adaptation in anticipation of future
vulnerabilities, one argument being that such anticipatory adaptation
may not necessarily adequately address current vulnerabilities (Preston
and Stafford-Smith, 2009).
The predominant
stakeholder method for assessing how vulnerability will change in the
future is participatory scenario development. Scenarios can be defined
as plausible representations of how the future may unfold. Community
scenario writing is a participatory approach based on dialogue between
futures researchers and climate-vulnerable communities that enables
context-awareness (Gidley et al, 2009). Participatory scenario building
is a popular approach in visioning environmental futures, and guidance
has been produced on good practice (Pahl-Worstl, 2008; Bizikova et al
2009). A number of authors have contended that future changes in
socio-economic systems have been insufficiently integrated with an
analysis of climate change impacts, and that participatory methods of
scenario development are the ideal approach for analysing potential
change in socio-economic systems (Berkhout et al, 2003). In particular,
participatory scenario planning is intrinsically linked with the
understanding that anticipatory learning is required to bring about
adaptation to climate change (Tschakert and Dietrich, 2010).
As
with community vulnerability assessments and expert judgment, there are
many examples of participatory scenario development within various
sectors and different geographical regions. One example took an
integrated approach to the construction of socio-economic scenarios
required for the analysis of climate change impacts on European
agricultural land use (Abildtrup et al, 2006). Whilst based on global
scenarios developed in the IPCC Special report on Emissions Scenarios
(SRES – Nakicenovic et al., 2000), a stepwise downscaling
procedure based on expert judgment and pairwise comparison was
presented to obtain quantitative socio-economic parameters, such as
prices and productivity estimates which were then input to the
ACCELERATES integrated land use model.
Another
project used participatory modelling for assessment of climate change
impacts on water resources in the Thukela River Basin from 2007-09
(Andersson et al, 2010). Scenario-modelling using several
regionally-downscaled climate change scenarios linked to hydrological
and agro-hydrological models was combined with stakeholder
identification of prominent climate and water-related issues, including
information to be produced and institutional-related obstacles to be
overcome to reduce vulnerability (Andersson et al, 2010). Likewise
participatory scenario processes were applied to water issues in the
flood-prone municipality of Delta, British Columbia, Canada, producing
3-D computer-generated images of climate change futures (Burch et al,
2010).
