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Projects: Trends & Transitions | Vulnerability | Knowledge Systems

Vulnerability Analysis of the Coupled Human-Environment System

Who and what are vulnerable to the multiple environmental and human changes underway, and where? How are these changes and their consequences attenuated or amplified by different human and environmental conditions? What can be done to reduce vulnerability to change? How may more resilient and adaptive communities and societies be built? The project presents a conceptual framework to account for the vulnerability of coupled human-environment systems with diverse and complex linkages. The project's vulnerability framework is used to analyze three case studies to illustrate how the framework can inform vulnerability assessments. The tropical southern Yucatán region in Mexico represents a development frontier in which agriculture and eco-archaeo-tourism competes for use of tropical forestlands. The arid Yaqui Valley of northeast Mexico is a rapidly developing commercial agricultural center predicated on irrigation. The third case study, the pan-Arctic, experiences changes directly tied to global processes, affecting its sensitive biophysical systems and altering the expectations of its occupants.

The project found that vulnerability rests largely within the condition and dynamics of the coupled human-environment systems exposed to hazards, and that vulnerability analysis must be comprehensive, treating not only the system in question but also its many and varied linkages. The case studies illustrate that coupled human-environment systems prove to be quite complex with regard to their vulnerability (exposure, sensitivity, and resilience) to environmental hazards, affected by social and biophysical processes and flows within and across the boundaries of the systems. In each case, external political and economic forces as well as environmental change are reshaping regional and local environmental uses and coping capacities. The framework steers the case studies toward integrated analyses, linkages, and feedbacks within and beyond the coupled systems in question and helps identify gaps in information and understanding relevant to reducing vulnerability in the system as a whole.

Lessons that have direct applicability for vulnerability assessments for decision making include:

• Human and biophysical vulnerability are linked and should be treated accordingly.
• Beware of one-dimensional vulnerability analyses and be cognizant of varied components and scalar linkages in the coupled system, which increase the range of expected outcomes.
• Do not assume that broadly similar coupled systems have the same vulnerabilities; complex dynamics may cause consequences to vary by system or locale.
• Do not assume that all parts of the coupled system have the same vulnerability; subsystems and components, especially social units, may experience exposure differently, register different impacts, and maintain different response options.
• Although comprehensive vulnerability analysis and place-based variations in the coupled systems and processes affecting them favor multiple approaches, vulnerability assessments should follow a common general methodological framework.
• Critical response opportunities are contingent on the coupled system or place in question; thus, general guidelines for response options should be malleable.
• Conscious efforts must be made to create institutional structures that link vulnerability analyses to decision making.

Professors B. L. Turner II and Pamela Matson lead this work. The full team includes: Robert Corell, Lindsey Christensen, Noelle Eckley, Grete Hovelsrud-Broda, Jeanne Kasperson, Roger Kasperson, Amy Luers, Marybeth Long Martello, Svein Mathiesen, Pamela Matson, James McCarthy, Rosamond Naylor, Colin Polsky, Alexander Pulsipher, Andrew Schiller, Henrik Selin, Nicholas Tyler, and B. L. Turner II.

Home | Overview | Projects | People | Publications | Events | Private
Projects: Trends & Transitions | Vulnerability | Knowledge Systems