Community-Based Climate Vulnerability and Adaptation Tools: A Review of Tools and Their Applications

Abstract

Conservation and development organizations conduct vulnerability and adaptation assessments to assess the vulnerability of coastal communities and ecosystems to climate change and to identify adaptation strategies to address these impacts. Local assessments are needed to provide this information at the scale of communities and critical habitats. Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of tools developed to assess climate vulnerability and adaptation at the community level. However, there has been limited synthesis of the available tools across disciplines in the peer-reviewed literature and limited guidance provided to help conservation practitioners and development planners select which tool is most appropriate for a given application. This article reviews a number of tools designed for community-level climate vulnerability and adaptation assessments and highlights their advantages and limitations to help managers make informed decisions about tool selection. Selection of tools will involve tradeoffs in terms of the capacity and resources needed to apply the tools and the aspects of social and ecological vulnerability that they address.