Chapter 2: Determinants of Risk: Exposure and Vulnerability
2.2. Defining Determinants of Risk: Hazard, Exposure, and Vulnerability
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2.2.2. The Factors of Risk
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While vulnerability is a key concept for both disaster risk and climate change adaptation, the term is employed in numerous other contexts, for instance to refer to epidemiological and psychological fragilities, ecosystem sensitivity, or the conditions, circumstances, and drivers that make people vulnerable to natural and economic stressors (Kasperson et al., 1988; Cutter, 1994; Wisner et al., 2004; Brklacich and Bohle, 2006; Haines et al., 2006; Villagrán de León, 2006). It is common to find blanket descriptions of the elderly, children, or women as ‘vulnerable,’ without any indication as to what these groups are vulnerable to (Wisner, 1993; Enarson and Morrow, 1998; Morrow, 1999; Bankoff, 2004; Cardona, 2004, 2011).
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2.5. Dimensions and Trends of Vulnerability and Exposure
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2.5.2. Social Dimensions
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2.5.2.1. Demography
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2.5.2.1.2. Social groups
Research evidence of the differential vulnerability of social groups is extensive and raises concerns about the disproportionate effects of climate change on identifiable, marginalized populations (Bohle et al., 1994; Kasperson and Kasperson, 2001; Thomalla et al., 2006). Particular groups and conditions have been identified as having differential exposure or vulnerability to extreme events, for example race/ethnicity (Fothergill et al., 1999; Elliott and Pais, 2006; Cutter and Finch, 2008), socioeconomic class and caste (O’Keefe et al., 1976; Peacock et al., 1997; Ray-Bennett, 2009), gender (Sen, 1981), age (both the elderly and children; Jabry, 2003; Wisner, 2006b; Bartlett, 2008), migration, and housing tenure (whether renter or owner), as among the most common social vulnerability characteristics (Cutter and Finch, 2008). Morrow (1999) extends and refines this list to include residents of group living facilities; ethnic minorities (by language); recent migrants (including immigrants); tourists and transients; physically or mentally disabled (see also McGuire et al., 2007; Peek and Stough, 2010); large households; renters; large concentrations of children and youth; poor households; the homeless (see also Wisner, 1998); and women-headed households. Generally, the state of vulnerability is defined by a specific population at a particular scale; aggregations (and generalizations) are often less meaningful and require careful interpretation (Adger and Kelly, 1999).
One of the largest bodies of research evidence, and one which can be an exemplar for the way many other marginalized groups are differentially impacted or affected by extreme events, has been on gender and disaster, and on women in particular (e.g., Neal and Phillips, 1990; Enarson and Morrow, 1998; Neumayer and Plümper, 2007). This body of literature is relatively recent, particularly in a developed world context, given the longer recognition of gender concerns in the development field (Fordham, 1998). The specific gender and climate change link including self-defined gender groups has been even more recent (e.g., Masika, 2002; Pincha and Krishna, 2009). The research evidence emphasizes the social construction of gendered vulnerability in which women and girls are often (although not always) at greater risk of dying in disasters, typically marginalized from decisionmaking fora, and discriminated and acted against in post-disaster recovery and reconstruction efforts (Houghton, 2009; Sultana, 2010).
Women or other socially marginalized or excluded groups are not vulnerable through biology (except in very particular circumstances) but are made so by societal structures and roles. For example, in the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, many males were out to sea in boats, fulfilling their roles as fishermen, and were thus less exposed than were many women who were on the seashore, fulfilling their roles as preparers and marketers of the fish catch. However, the women were made vulnerable not simply by their location and role but by societal norms which did not encourage survival training for girls (e.g., to swim or climb trees) and which placed the majority of the burden of child and elder care with women. Thus, escape was made more difficult for women carrying children and responsible for others (Doocy et al., 2007).
The gender and disaster/climate change literature has also recognized resilience/capacity/capability alongside vulnerability. This elaboration of the vulnerability approach makes clear that vulnerability in these identified groups is not an immutable or totalizing condition. The vulnerability ‘label’ can reinforce notions of passivity and helplessness, which obscure the very significant, active contributions that socially marginalized groups make in coping with and adapting to extremes. An example is provided in Box 2-2.
Box 2-2 | Integrating Disaster Risk Reduction, Climate Adaptation, and Resilience-Building: the Garifuna Women of Honduras
The Garifuna women of Honduras could be said to show multiple vulnerability characteristics (Brondo, 2007). They are women, the gender often made vulnerable by patriarchal structures worldwide; they come from Honduras, a developing country exposed to many hazards; they belong to an ethnic group descended from African slaves, which is socially, economically, and politically marginalized; and they depend largely upon a subsistence economy, with a lack of education, health, and other resources. However, despite these markers of vulnerability, the Garifuna women have organized to reduce their communities’ exposure to hazards and vulnerability to disasters through the protection and development of their livelihood opportunities (Fordham et al., 2011).
The women lead the Comité de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras, which is a grassroots, community-based group of the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna that was developed in the wake of Hurricane Mitch in 1998. After Mitch, there was a lack of external support and so the Comité women organized themselves and repaired hundreds of houses, businesses, and public buildings, in the process of which women were empowered and trained in non-traditional work. They campaigned to buy land for relocating housing to safer areas, in which the poorest families participated in the reconstruction process. Since being trained themselves in vulnerability and capacity mapping by grassroots women in Jamaica, they have in turn trained 60 trainers in five Garifuna communities to carry out mapping exercises in their communities.
The Garifuna women have focused on livelihood-based activities to ensure food security by reviving and improving the production of traditional root crops, building up traditional methods of soil conservation, carrying out training in organic composting and pesticide use, and creating the first Garifuna farmers’ market. In collaborative efforts, 16 towns now have established tool banks, and five have seed banks. Through reforestation, the cultivation of medicinal and artisanal plants, and the planting of wild fruit trees along the coast, they are helping to prevent erosion and reducing community vulnerability to hazards and the vagaries of climate.
The Garifuna women’s approach, which combines livelihood-based recovery, disaster risk reduction, and climate change adaptation, has had wide-ranging benefits. They have built up their asset base (human, social, physical, natural, financial, and political), and improved their communities’ nutrition, incomes, natural resources, and risk management. They continue to partner with local, regional, and international networks for advocacy and knowledge exchange. The women and communities are still at risk (Drusine, 2005) but these strategies help reduce their socioeconomic vulnerability and dependence on external aid (Fordham et al., 2011).
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2.5.2.3. Health and Well-Being
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The health dimension of vulnerability includes differential physical, physiological, and mental health effects of extreme events in different regions and on different social groups (McMichael et al., 2003; van Lieshout et al., 2004; Haines et al., 2006; Few, 2007; Costello et al., 2009). It also includes, in a link to the institutional dimension, health service provision (e.g., environmental health and public health issues, infrastructure and conditions; Street et al., 2005), which may be impacted by extreme events (e.g., failures in hospital/health center building structures; inability to access health services because of storms and floods). Vulnerability can also be understood in terms of functionality related to communication, medical care, maintaining independence, supervision, and transportation. In addition individuals including children, senior citizens, and pregnant women and those who may need additional response assistance including the disabled, those living in institutionalized settings, those from diverse cultures, people with limited English proficiency or are non-English speaking, those with no access to transport,have chronic medical disorders, and have pharmacological dependency can also be considered vulnerable in a health context.
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2.5.2.4. Cultural Dimensions
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Traditional behaviors tied to local (and wider) tradition and cultural practices can increase vulnerability – for example, unequal gender norms that put women and girls at greater risk, or traditional uses of the environment that have not adapted (or cannot adapt) to changed environmental circumstances. On the other hand, local or indigenous knowledge can reduce vulnerabilities too (Gaillard et al., 2007, 2010). Furthermore, cultural practices are often subtle and may be opaque to outsiders. The early hazards paradigm literature (White, 1974; Burton et al., 1978) referred often to culturally embedded fatalistic attitudes, which resulted in inaction in the face of disaster risk. However, Schmuck-Widmann (2000), in her social anthropological studies of char dwellers in Bangladesh, revealed how a belief that disaster occurrence and outcomes were in the hands of God did not preclude preparatory activities. Perceptions of risk (and their interpretation by others) depend on the cultural and social context (Slovic, 2000; Oppenheimer and Todorov, 2006; Schneider et al., 2007).
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2.5.3. Economic Dimensions
Work and Livelihoods
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Paavola’s (2008) analysis of livelihoods, vulnerability, and adaptation to climate change in Morogoro, Tanzania, is indicative of the way extreme events impact livelihoods in specific ways. Here, rural households are found to be more vulnerable to climate variability and climate change than are those in urban environments (see also Section 2.5.1.3). This is because rural incomes and consumption levels are significantly lower, there are greater levels of poverty, and more limited access to markets and other services. More specifically, women are made more vulnerable than men because they lack access to livelihoods other than climatesensitive agriculture. Local people have employed a range of strategies (extensification, intensification, diversification, and migration) to manage climate variability but these have sometimes had undesirable environmental outcomes, which have increased their vulnerability. In the absence of opportunities to fundamentally change their livelihood options, we see here an example of short-term coping rather than longterm climate adaptation (Paavola, 2008).
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2.5.4.1. Intersectionality and Other Dimensions
The dimensions discussed above generate differential effects but it is important to consider not just differences between single categories (e.g., between women and men) but the differences within a given category (e.g., ‘women’). This refers to intersectionality, where, for example, gender may be a significant variable but only when allied with race/ethnicity or some other variable. In Hurricane Katrina, it mattered (it still matters) whether you were black or white, upper class or working class, home owner or renter, old or young, woman or man in terms of relative exposure and vulnerability factors (Cutter et al., 2006; Elliott and Pais, 2006). Certain factors are identified as cross-cutting themes of particular importance for understanding the dynamic changes within exposure, vulnerability, and risk. In the Sphere Project’s minimum standards in humanitarian response, children, older people, persons with disabilities, gender, psychosocial issues, HIV and AIDS, and environment, climate change, and disaster risk reduction are identified as cross-cutting themes and must be considered, not as separate sectors, which people may or may not select for attention, but must be integrated within each sector (Sphere Project, 2011). Exactly which topics are selected as crosscutting themes, to be incorporated throughout an activity, is contextspecific. Below, we consider just two: different timing (diachronic aspects within a single day or across longer time periods) and different spatial and functional scales.
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2.5.4.3. Science and Technology
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Although approaches alternative to pure science- and technologybased ones have been suggested for decreasing vulnerability (Haque and Etkin, 2007; Marshall and Picou, 2008), such as blending western science and technology with indigenous knowledge (Mercer et al., 2010) and ecological cautiousness and the creation of eco-technologies with a pro-nature, pro-poor, and pro-women orientation (Kesavan and Swaminathan, 2006), their efficacy in the context of risk and vulnerability reduction remain undetermined.
