Health and climatic hazards: Framing social research on vulnerability,response and adaptation

Floods, windstorms, drought and wildfires have major implications for human health. To date, conceptual advances in analysis of vulnerability and adaptation to climatic hazards from the environmental and social sciences have not been widely applied in terms of health, though key progress is being made particularly in relation to climate change. This paper seeks to take this conceptual grounding further, examining how key themes relate to health concerns, exploring connections with existing health literatures, and developing an organising framework to aid analysis of how vulnerability to health impacts varies within society and how actors make decisions and take action in relation to climatic hazards and health. Social science research on this theme is challenging in part because of the complex mechanisms that link hazard events to health outcomes, and the many-layered factors that shape differential vulnerability and response within changing societal and environmental contexts (including the dual effect of hazards on human health and health systems, and the combination of ‘external’, ‘personal’ and ‘internal’ elements of vulnerability). Tracing a ‘health impact pathway’ from hazard event through health risk effects to health outcomes can provide a research tool with which to map out where the different factors that contribute to vulnerability/coping capacity come into effect.     

Flame and fortune in California: The material and political dimensions of vulnerability

This paper seeks to clarify and refine the assertion that vulnerability exists as both a material, condition and discursive construct. Building off of previous scholarship analyzing the production of, vulnerabilities, we present a conceptual framework that illuminates how material vulnerabilities are translated into political vulnerabilities and ossified in the policy realm. We argue that specifying components of, and relationships between, the material and political aspects of vulnerability will result in a more sophisticated articulation of vulnerability as a recursive process. In order to achieve this level of analysis we propose a spatial–historical analytic approach that blends point-in-time and, empirically driven analysis with robust historical and political economic analysis. We use the largest urban wildfire – in terms of dwellings lost – in California's history to show how the persistent disconnection between material and political forms of vulnerability has, over time, resulted in contradictory landscapes where homes are intentionally placed in landscapes vulnerable to wildfires with reduced fire protection. Spatial historical analysis of the Tunnel Fire reveals how representations of vulnerability oftentimes deviate from lived experiences, engendering responses of exploitation, ignorance, mobilization and resistance. This framework also recognizes how these responses can create new vulnerabilities while also maintaining, deepening and diminishing existing material conditions. Finally, relational analysis illuminates how factors generating vulnerability in fire areas also contribute to and reinforce vulnerabilities within other parts of cities like Oakland, California.     

气候变化对越南北方水稻生产的影响

利用越南北方各省19个代表站近50a的气候和水稻资料,采用EOF等数理统计方法,分析了气候变化对越南北方水稻生产的影响。同时讨论了水稻趋势产量和气象产量变化的特征,气温、降水等要素与水稻产量之间的关系以及1959年以来气象灾害对越南北方水稻产量形成的影响,并通过积分回归分析探讨了不同因子在不同时段对水稻生产的作用,进而提出在未来气候变暖背景下越南北方应采取的相应对策。     

Climate change,social vulnerability and child nutrition in South Asia

Despite recent advancements in global population well-being and food security, climate change threatens to undermine child nutritional health, particularly for marginalized populations in tropical low- and middle-income countries. South Asia is at particular risk for climate-driven undernutrition due to a combination of historical weather exposures, existing nutritional deficits, and a lack of sanitation access. Previous studies have established that precipitation extremes increase rates of undernutrition in this region, but the existing literature lacks adequate consideration of temperature anomalies, mediating social factors, and the developmentally-relevant timing of exposure. We combine high-resolution temperature and precipitation data with large-sample survey data on household demographics and child anthropometry, using an approach that incorporates three key developmental periods and a rigorous fixed effects design. We find that precipitation extremes in the first year of life significantly decrease children’s height-for-age (HAZ) in South Asia. The detrimental effects of extreme precipitation are especially concentrated in under-resourced households, such as those lacking access to proper sanitation and education for women, while anomalous heat is particularly harmful for children in Pakistan, though it tends to benefit children in some demographic groups. These results indicate that nutritional status in South Asia is highly responsive to climate exposures, and that addressing sanitation infrastructure and other development priorities is a pathway towards reducing this vulnerability.     

Scholarly networks on resilience,vulnerability and adaptation within the human dimensions of global environmental change

This paper presents the results of a bibliometric analysis of the knowledge domains resilience, vulnerability and adaptation within the research activities on human dimensions of global environmental change. We analyzed how 2286 publications between 1967 and 2005 are related in terms of co-authorship relations, and citation relations.The number of publications in the three knowledge domains increased rapidly between 1995 and 2005. However, the resilience knowledge domain is only weakly connected with the other two domains in terms of co-authorships and citations. The resilience knowledge domain has a background in ecology and mathematics with a focus on theoretical models, while the vulnerability and adaptation knowledge domains have a background in geography and natural hazards research with a focus on case studies and climate change research. There is an increasing number of cross citations and papers classified in multiple knowledge domains. This seems to indicate an increasing integration of the different knowledge domains.     

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

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.     

Farmers’ coping response to the low flows in the lower Yellow River: A case study of temporal dimensions of vulnerability

Water scarcity in northern China has been a topic of concern in China for many years, but the increased frequency and duration of “no-flow” events in the Yellow River in the 1990s created a flurry of recent activity in the academic and policy arenas. These low-flow events severely disrupted the supply of irrigation water for agriculture in the lower reaches of the Yellow River and posed a substantial threat to farmers’ livelihoods. Within a broader effort to assess farmers’ vulnerability to water shortages, this qualitative research focuses on the coping mechanisms and adaptive strategies adopted by farming households in three villages in Shandong Province (Ma, Ding, and Xing). With increasing water stress and other stresses from land degradation and lack of market access, farmers’ coping mechanisms have evolved, expanding from one-time adjustments to long-term adaptations, and switching focus from securing reliable water sources to improving irrigation efficiency and diversifying both on-farm and off-farm production. The three villages have different vulnerability profiles and adopted different patterns of adaptive processes that reveal the key roles played by community leaders and the early innovators. The research presented here contributes a temporal and dynamic dimension to the study of vulnerability which is largely missing from the current literature, and provides practical insights about how to improve farmers’ adaptive capacities in the face of water shortages in northern China.     

Archival explorations of climate variability and social vulnerability in colonial Mexico

In this paper, unpublished archival documentary sources are used to explore the vulnerability to–and implications of–climatic variability and extreme weather events in colonial Mexico. Attention focuses on three regions covering a variety of environmental, social, economic, and political contexts and histories and located at key points along a north-south rainfall gradient: Chihuahua in the arid north, Oaxaca in the wetter south and Guanajuato located in the central Mexican highlands. A number of themes are considered. First, the significance of successive, prolonged, or combined climate events as triggers of agrarian crisis. Second, a case study demonstrating the national and regional impacts of a particularly devastating climate induced famine, culminating with the so-called ‘Year of Hunger’ between 1785 and 1786, is presented. The way in which social networks and community engagement were rallied as a means of fortifying social resilience to this and other crises will be highlighted. Third, the impacts of selected historical flood events are explored in order to highlight how the degree of impact of a flood was a function of public expectation, preparedness and also the particular socio-economic and environmental context in which the event took place. An overview of the spatial and temporal variations in vulnerability and resilience to climatic variability and extreme weather events in colonial Mexico is then provided, considering those recorded events that could potentially relate to broader scale, possibly global, climate changes.     

华东地区台风气候特征及危险性分析

基于2001—2020年影响华东地区的90个台风资料,利用统计学方法,分析台风年际、月际及登陆分布特征,采用信息扩散理论方法,统计风和雨2个主要致灾因子发生概率,在此基础上,开展台风致灾因子危险性评价。结果表明：影响华东地区的台风以强台风和台风为主,年均4.5个,主要集中在7—9月,8月最多,登陆台湾省频次最多,其次为福建省和浙江省;台风的最大风速在30～40 m/s的概率较大,最大降雨量在200～400 mm的概率较大;福建省、浙江省和江西省的台风致灾因子危险性较大,为台风严重影响区;山东省和安徽省的台风致灾因子危险性中等,为中度影响区;江苏省和上海市的台风致灾因子危险性较小,为轻度影响区。     

Towards sectoral and standardised vulnerability assessments: the example of heatwave impacts on human health

The relevance of climate change is especially apparent through the impacts it has on natural and societal systems. A standardised methodology to assess these impacts in order to produce comparable results is still lacking. We propose a semi-quantitative approach to calculate vulnerability to climate change, with the ability to capture complex mechanisms in human-environmental systems. The key mechanisms are delineated and translated into a deterministic graph (impact chain). A fuzzy logic algorithm is then applied to address uncertainty regarding the definition of clear threshold values. We exemplify our approach by analysing the direct impacts of climate change on human health in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, where the urban heat island potential, the percentage of elderly population as well as the occurrence of heat waves determine impact intensity. Increases in heatwaves and elderly population will aggravate the impacts. While the influence of climatic changes is apparent on larger spatial scales, societal factors determine the small scale distribution of impacts within our regional case study. In addition to identifying climate change impact hot spots, the structured approach of the impact chain and the methodology of aggregation enable to infer from the results back to the main constituents of vulnerability. Thus, it can provide a basis for decision-makers to set priorities for specific adaptation measures within the complex field of climate change impacts.     

Mapping global patterns of drought risk: An empirical framework based on sub-national estimates of hazard,exposure and vulnerability

A global map of drought risk has been elaborated at the sub-national administrative level. The motivation for this study is the observation that little research and no concerted efforts have been made at the global level to provide a consistent and equitable drought risk management framework for multiple regions, population groups and economic sectors. Drought risk is assessed for the period 2000–2014 and is based on the product of three independent determinants: hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Drought hazard is derived from a non-parametric analysis of historical precipitation deficits at the 0.5°; drought exposure is based on a non-parametric aggregation of gridded indicators of population and livestock densities, crop cover and water stress; and drought vulnerability is computed as the arithmetic composite of high level factors of social, economic and infrastructural indicators, collected at both the national and sub-national levels. The performance evaluation of the proposed models underlines their statistical robustness and emphasizes an empirical resemblance between the geographic patterns of potential drought impacts and previous results presented in the literature. Our findings support the idea that drought risk is driven by an exponential growth of regional exposure, while hazard and vulnerability exhibit a weaker relationship with the geographic distribution of risk values. Drought risk is lower for remote regions, such as tundras and tropical forests, and higher for populated areas and regions extensively exploited for crop production and livestock farming, such as South-Central Asia, Southeast of South America, Central Europe and Southeast of the United States. As climate change projections foresee an increase of drought frequency and intensity for these regions, then there is an aggravated risk for global food security and potential for civil conflict in the medium- to long-term. Since most agricultural regions show high infrastructural vulnerability to drought, then regional adaptation to climate change may begin through implementing and fostering the widespread use of irrigation and rainwater harvesting systems. In this context, reduction in drought risk may also benefit from diversifying regional economies on different sectors of activity and reducing the dependence of their GDP on agriculture.     

Social,environmental and health vulnerability to climate change in the Brazilian Northeastern Region

A regional vulnerability study in relation to the projected patterns of climate change (A2 and B2 scenarios) was developed for the Brazilian Northeastern region. An aggregated Vulnerability Index was constructed for each of the nine States of the region, based on the following information: population projections; climate-induced migration scenarios; disease trends; desertification rates; economic projections (GDP and employment) and projections for health care costs. The results obtained shall subsidize public policies for the protection of the human population from the projected impacts of regional changes in climate patterns.     

郑州市大雾气候特点及一次个例分析

为了了解近20 a郑州市大雾的时空变化特征,根据1980-2005年郑州市大雾观测记录,统计分析了这一时期郑州市大雾的变化特点及产生大雾时的气象要素特征;并利用河南省地面和探空观测资料以及NCEP1°×1°再分析资料,从要素场、大气稳定度等方面,对2007年12月25-27日郑州市大雾形成原因进行了分析.结果表明:郑州市年雾日数呈下降趋势,每月都可以出现大雾,但12月最多,6月最少.降水后较大的相对湿度、稳定的大气层结以及近地层较小风速等是大雾形成的必要条件.     

Virtue and vulnerability: Discourses on women, gender and climate change

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.     

Agrarian stress and climate change in the Eastern Gangetic Plains: Gendered vulnerability in a stratified social formation

This paper reviews the complex impact of climate change on gender relations and associated vulnerability on the Eastern Gangetic Plains of Nepal and India. Field research has identified that gendered vulnerability to climate change is intricately connected to local and macro level political economic processes. Rather than being a single driver of change, climate is one among several stresses on agriculture, alongside a broader set of non-climatic processes. While these pressures are linked to large scale political–economic processes, the response on the ground is mediated by the local level relations of class and caste, creating stratified patterns of vulnerability. The primary form of gendered vulnerability in the context of agrarian stress emerges from male out-migration, which has affected the distribution of labour and resources. While migration occurs amongst all socio-economic groups, women from marginal farmer and tenant households are most vulnerable. While the causes of migration are only indirectly associated with climate change, migration itself is rendering women who are left behind from marginal households, more vulnerable to ecological shocks such as droughts due to the sporadic flow of income and their reduced capacity for investment in off-farm activities. It is clear that policies and initiatives to address climate change in stratified social formations such as the Eastern Gangetic Plains, will be ineffective without addressing the deeper structural intersections between class, caste and gender.     

Structure, agency and environment: Toward an integrated perspective on vulnerability

We review five perspectives on human vulnerability to environmental change—biophysical, human ecological, political economy, constructivist and political ecology—and assess their respective strengths and weaknesses. While each of these perspectives offers important insights, and some theoretical convergence is evident, the field remains divided along a number theoretical fracture lines. Two deeply rooted metatheoretical assumptions—essentialism and nominalism—are hindering the construction of a more integrated perspective on vulnerability, one capable of addressing the interrelated dynamics of social structure, human agency and the environment. We conclude by suggesting that an evolutionary perspective on social change, grounded in a critical realist epistemology, provides the best prospect for avoiding the above pitfalls and advancing our understanding of vulnerability.     

Securing Indigenous politics: A critique of the vulnerability and adaptation approach to the human dimensions of climate change in the Canadian Arctic

Over the past decade research examining the human dimensions of climatic change in the Arctic has expanded significantly and has become the dominant framework through which the relations between northern peoples and climatic change are understood by scholars, policy makers, political leaders, and the media. This paper critically examines the assumptions, exclusions, and orientations that characterize this broad literature, and suggests revising and expanding the terms upon which it is carried out. It focuses in particular on the exclusion of colonialism from the study of human vulnerability and adaptation to climatic change, the framing of Indigenous peoples and communities in terms of the local and the traditional, and the ways in which efforts to improve the lives of northern Indigenous peoples risk perpetuating colonial relations. The paper argues that these exclusions and orientations lead scholars to systematically overlook the immense importance of resource extraction and shipping as human dimensions of climatic change in the Canadian Arctic, and it examines the implications of such oversights.     

面向新型城镇化的气候承载力指标研究——以皖江城市带为例

从服务新型城镇化进程出发,本文基于气候条件与人类活动的相互作用关系,同时考虑气候的资源和灾害双重属性,识别并构建了包含气候资源供给、气候灾害限制和城镇化协调发展水平三方面要素的气候承载力评价指标体系,进而采用熵权法、耦合协调度模型和GIS技术等方法实现了指标的量化,形成了气候承载力的综合评价指标和模型。以皖江城市带为例,应用该套指标方法探讨了气候承载力的空间格局与关键影响因子,结果表明,皖江城市带城镇化发展格局与气候承载力分布较为一致,气候承载力较高的地区意味着可容纳的城市发展负荷量较高,而与之对应的这些地区城镇化集聚程度也较高;但气候承载力水平空间差异显著,区域整体气候承载力还有待进一步优化提升。根据城镇化集聚度和气候承载力特点,将皖江城市带分为4个等级和12种类型,并进一步揭示了不同类型地区存在的承载力"短板"和问题现状。