Vulnerability to climate change: people, place and exposure to hazard

Abstract

The Human Dimension of the Twinning European and South Asian River Basins to Enhance Capacity and Implement Adaptive Management Approaches Project (EC-Project BRAHMATWINN) is aimed at developing socio-economic tools and context for the effective inclusion of the "Human Dimension" or socio-economic vulnerability into the overall assessment of climate risk in the twinned basins of the Upper Brahmaputra River Basin (UBRB), and the Upper Danube River Basin (UDRB) . This work is conducted in the light of stakeholder/actor analysis and the prevailing legal framework. In order to effectively achieve this end, four key research and associated activities were defined: 1. Identifying stakeholders and actors including: implement an approach to ensure a broad spread of appropriate stakeholder input to the assessment of vulnerability undertaken in Asia and Europe within the research activities of the project. 2. Contextualising legal framework: to provide an assessment of the governance framework relating to socio-environmental policy development within the study site administrative areas leading to the specific identification of related policy and legal recommendations. 3. Spatial analysis and mapping of vulnerability: providing a spatial assessment of the variation of vulnerability to pre-determined environmental stressors across the study areas with an additional specific focus on gender. 4. Inclusion of findings with the broader context of the BRAHMATWINN risk of climate change study through scenarios of hazard and vulnerability (subsequent chapters). This study utilises stakeholder inputs to effectively identify and map relative weightings of vulnerability domains, such as health and education in the context of pre-specified hazards such as flood. The process is underpinned by an adaptation of the IPCC (2001) which characterizes Risk as having the components of Hazard (physiographic component) and Vulnerability (socio-economic component).