Abstract
This paper presents a method for the analysis of socio-ecological patterns of vulnerability of people being at risk of losing their livelihoods as a consequence of global environmental change. This method fills a gap in meth- odologies for vulnerability analysis by providing general- izations of the factors that shape vulnerability in specific socio-ecological systems and showing their spatial occur- rence. The proposed method consists of four steps that include both quantitative and qualitative analyses. To start, the socio-ecological system exposed to global environ- mental changes that will be studied needs to be determined. This could, for example, be farmers in drylands, urban populations in coastal areas and forest-dependent people in the tropics. Next, the core dimensions that shape vulnera- bility in the socio-ecological system of interest need to be defined. Subsequently, a set of spatially explicit indicators that reflect these core dimensions is selected. Cluster ana- lysis is used for grouping the indicator data. The clusters found, referred to as vulnerability profiles, describe dif- ferent typical groupings of conditions and processes that create vulnerability in the socio-ecological system under study, and their spatial distribution is provided. Interpre- tation and verification of these profiles is the last step in the analysis. We illustrate the application of this method by analysing the patterns of vulnerability of (smallholder) farmers in drylands. We identify eight distinct vulnerability profiles in drylands that together provide a global overview of different processes taking place and sub-national detail of their distribution. By overlaying the spatial distribution of these profiles with specific outcome indicators such as conflict occurrence or migration, the method can also be used to understand these phenomena better. Analysis of vulnerability profiles will in a next step be used as a basis for identifying responses to reduce vulnerability, for example, to facilitate the transfer of best practices to reduce vulnerability between different places.
Highlights
Many situations of human vulnerability around the world share similar features in terms of drivers and processes that create them
This paper presents a method for the analysis of socio-ecological patterns of vulnerability of people being at risk of losing their livelihoods as a consequence of global environmental change
While this paper focuses on the method, related publications apply this method and elaborate in more detail patterns of vulnerability related to forest overexploitation, rapid urbanization in coastal areas and use the identified patterns of vulnerability to analyse conflict in drylands (Sterzel et al 2014)
Summary
Many situations of human vulnerability around the world share similar features in terms of drivers and processes that create them. While the syndrome approach can be used for analysing separate local and regional case studies, it can be applied to provide a global mapping, as exemplified in Cassel-Gintz et al (1997) and Ludeke et al (2004) who semi-quantitatively assess the presence of non-sustainable development paths by employing fuzzy calculation rules on the basis of globally available indicator-information on factors of interest This requires a set-up in which the various factors of interest are explicitly hypothesized to affect vulnerability of human well-being towards global and environmental change in a certain prescribed way, as represented by the (semi-quantitative) relationships employed. We do not impose a hypothesized predefined relationship, but let the available data on vulnerability mechanisms tell their own story: exploring the structure in the data-space we hope to (inductively) obtain clues on the underlying vulnerability patterns in a specific socio-ecological system worldwide, which can be presented on a global map
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