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Flashcards in Climate Vulnerability and Adaption Deck (11)
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1
Q

What is vulnerability?

A
  • Predisposition to be adversely affected. Encompasses a variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt (IPCC, 2013)
  • Physical environments vulnerable to climate change
2
Q

What is outcome framing?

A
  • End-point approach takes any consequences that remain after adaption has taken place define levels of vulnerability
  • Linear result of project impacts of climate change
  • Problem: human impacts on Earth’s climate system
  • Boundaries: ‘nature’ distinct from society’
    • One system is affecting the other
  • Discourse: vulnerability is a scientifically measurable
    • Outcome of exposure to climate risks

O’Brien et al., 2007

3
Q

What is contextual framing?

A
  • Starting point approach considers vulnerability as present inability to cope with external pressures
  • ‘Wounded soldier’ approach, addressing present-day vulnerability will reduce vulnerability under future climate conditions (Kelly and Adger, 2000)
  • Problem: transformation of Earth system with uneven outcomes
  • Boundaries: ‘nature’ and ‘society’ are integrated
  • Discourse: vulnerability as a human security issue…
    • Uneven social and natural systems and exposure to multiple types of risk
    • Not just climate risks

O’Brien et al., 2007

4
Q

Why can’t contextual and outcome framing be joined?

A

As they are rooted in different discourses

5
Q

How do contextual and outcome framing compliment each other?

A
  • Human-security framing of climate change has been far less visible in international scientific and policy debates and addressing this with a complementary approach would broad scope of adaption policies

O’Brien et al. (2013)

6
Q

What is the biophysical vulnerability in regard to environmental change?

A
  • Environmental degradation creates negative impacts
  • Fits norms of hazards and climate research
  • Actors are treated as passive victims that are treated as exogenous to society
  • Rests on expert knowledge and technological solutions that sidestep the inherently political and moral questions

McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008

7
Q

What is the human ecology vulnerability in regard to environmental change?

A
  • Too much change affects human-environment adjustments
  • Allows for multiple scales and types of coping with change

McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008

8
Q

What is the political economy vulnerability in regard to environmental change?

A
  • Inequality creates disproportionate impact on poor
  • Identifies structural conditions affecting vulnerability
  • Structural dynamics of capitalism to environmental degradation
  • Fails into the trap of essentialism –> categorical definitions

McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008

9
Q

What is the constructivist vulnerability in regard to environmental change?

A
  • vulnerability tied to human agency and culture
  • Reveals role of human agency in response to risk
  • Nominalism approach that treat categories as artefacts of the human mind –> lump nature into history

McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008

10
Q

What is the political ecology vulnerability to environmental change?

A
  • Physical and social risks independent but interrelated
  • Nature independent (unlike political economy), risks still given cultural expression
  • Lack clear conceptual mechanism for connecting patterns in diversity of the social over space and time to changes in relevant environments

McLaughlin and Dietz, 2008

11
Q

What do McLaughlin and Dietz (2008) note about the 6 different vulnerabilities to environmental change?

A

None of the framings give proper weight to role of social structure, human agency and the environment in either producing or mitigating vulnerability