Much discussion about adaptation to climate change has focused on strengthening infrastructure such as roads and bridges or in building physical protection such as sea walls. Now, a growing number of NGOs and policy analysts are urging that adaptation to climate change should also consider actions to reduce social vulnerability.
The principle is simple. Social vulnerability is the extent to which social and economic factors can make different people more or less vulnerable to the same physical hazard. Clearly, large storms and floods are serious, and can represent risks to most people. But social and economic contexts can also control the extent to which large and small climatic events can pose threats to populations. For example, farmers who only use one type of agriculture to get food and income are more at risk from drought than people who can call upon a variety of sources of income during difficult times.
Can climate change policies reduce social vulnerability easily? In practice, it is not so simple.
First, social vulnerability can be difficult to change in the short term. It can also arise from many causes. The work of Nobel-prize winner, Amartya Sen is considered by many to be a classic way to explain vulnerability. Sen studied the causes of serious famines during the twentieth century and concluded that famines rarely affected countries or regions equally. Instead, the impacts could be felt most by individuals or social groups who had the least secure access to food. In India, for example, landless waged laborers—who earned their living by travelling between different villages asking for work—were usually more vulnerable than farmers with some claim to land and who had social networks where they lived. Clearly, changing this situation means addressing themes such as land tenure, caste, and labor skills. Yet, combined work by local governments, development agencies, and local people has improved the vulnerability of many poorer people to famine.
Second, and more controversially, some analysts argue that reducing social vulnerability is better addressed by "development" work or Official Development Assistance (ODA) rather than through formal climate change policies. The reasons for this argument are that social vulnerability might arise from many causes, whereas climate change policy is better targeted at those problems that can be directly attributed to increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Some Annex I countries are concerned that reducing vulnerability might require long-term assistance, when funds might be more immediately used on greenhouse gas mitigation projects. Indeed, the Adaptation Fund of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was created to fund "concrete" adaptation projects in developing countries using funds from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM)—a mechanism to encourage investment in mitigations projects in developing countries.
Ironically, some mitigation projects—such as plantation forestry—have been criticized for reducing land-use options for local people in some developing countries, and therefore increasing social vulnerability. Some adaptation projects based on infrastructure have also been criticized for simply controlling physical events such as floods, rather than also improving access of vulnerable people to health services or alternative livelihoods.
One potential way to achieve a more focused, but socially-oriented, form of adaptation is through the concept of Community Based Adaptation (CBA). CBA is based among the poorest communities in developing countries that use natural resources, and who are at risk to climate change. Development workers can spend time in villages or districts learning from local people about the nature of risks in order to help design forms of adaptation that are more useful to local people. In Bangladesh, for example, the district of Khulna includes much coastland at risk from salinization and storm surges. Rather than building concrete storm shelters, CBA could include building on existing economic processes such as using irrigated rice fields for rice in dry seasons (when water is generally non-saline), and fattening crabs during the wet season (when saline water increases). CBA also includes enhancing access of farmers to urban markets for selling food and labor, as well as more traditional forms of adaptation such as increasing awareness of future climate change and introducing technologies for storing drinking water during floods and storms.
Adaptation to climate change is never going to be "either" infrastructure "or" reducing social vulnerability—ideally it should include both. Considering the benefits of reducing social vulnerability and the potential problems of building infrastructure alone will hopefully lead to more diverse and locally useful forms of adaptation.
