Elsevier

World Development

Volume 27, Issue 2, February 1999, Pages 249-269
World Development

Social Vulnerability to Climate Change and Extremes in Coastal Vietnam

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0305-750X(98)00136-3Get rights and content

Abstract

A framework for analyzing social vulnerability is outlined, an aspect largely underemphasized in assessments of the impacts of climate change and climate extremes. Vulnerability is defined in this paper as the exposure of individuals or collective groups to livelihood stress as a result of the impacts of such environmental change. It is constituted by individual and collective aspects which can be disaggregated, but are linked through the political economy of markets and institutions. Research in coastal northern Vietnam shows that baseline social vulnerability is enhanced by some institutional and economic factors associated with Vietnam's economic transition from central planning, namely the breakdown of collective action on protection from extreme events and an increasingly skewed income. Offsetting these trends are other institutional changes associated with the dynamic nature of the economic restructuring and evolution of the market transition in Vietnam, which decrease vulnerability.

Introduction

Thanks are due to Kirstin Dow, Steve Wiggins and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier version. Thanks are also due to participants at seminars at University College London and University of Newcastle upon Tyne; the Agricultural Economics Society Annual Conference, University of Reading, March 1998 and World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists, Venice, June 1998 where versions were presented.

This paper outlines a conceptual model of social vulnerability to climate change in order to better understand the processes of social adaptation to climate change impacts, particularly in rural agrarian societies, by examining present day vulnerability to extreme events. Social vulnerability is the exposure of groups or individuals to stress as a result of social and environmental change, where stress refers to unexpected changes and disruption to livelihoods. This definition emphasizes the social dimensions of vulnerability following the tradition of analysis of vulnerability to hazards, food insecurity and as a dimension of entitlements. This is in contrast to the predominant views on vulnerability to the impacts of climate change which concentrate on the physical dimensions of the issue. A set of indicators is developed to examine the relative vulnerability of any given set of individuals or social situation. These concepts are applied to a case study District in northern Vietnam, demonstrating that present day climate extremes as well as social and economic change result in an evolving state of vulnerability with offsetting and interlocking social, economic and institutional facets.

There is a critical need to understand the processes by which adaptation to global environmental change comes about, and the implications of these processes for present day vulnerability to these changes. Such enhanced understanding informs both the scientific community and policy makers of the underlying causes of vulnerability, and the potential policy for ameliorating such vulnerability.

At present there is agreement, at least in principle, by the world's governments that human impacts on the global climate system are significant. They further agree that these impacts are important enough to demand co-ordinated international action. But the years since the signing of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in 1992 have resulted only in frustration that this apparent scientific consensus is undermined by inaction such as that demonstrated at the Kyoto Agreement of the Convention in December 1997. The continued global rise in greenhouse gas emissions projected for the late 1990s and the early part of the next century will ensure that global climate change will not be avoided (Wigley, Richels and Edmonds, 1996). Even if there were concerted international action, however, the projected impacts of the enhanced greenhouse effect, namely changes in the global climate system, will occur. The world is therefore committed to adapting to a changed climate system in all its manifestations. This makes the understanding of adaptation and coping mechanisms, and hence the state of vulnerability, one of the most important research issues within the area of global environmental change.

The central insight brought by social scientists to the process of adaptation is that vulnerability is socially differentiated. The origins of the term can be traced through analysis of famine, hazards and entitlements, where the term has been applied in describing the state of individuals and societies coping with variability and stress (for applications and history of the concept see Ribot, Najam and Watson, 1996; Leach, Mearns and Scoones, 1997; Downing, 1991; Chen, 1994; Adger, 1996; Bohle, Downing and Watts, 1994; Watts and Bohle, 1993). Vulnerability is a state of well-being and is not the same for different populations living under different environmental conditions or faced with complex interactions of social norms, political institutions and resource endowments, technologies and inequalities. The causes of vulnerability are related to the environmental threat and fundamentally to the economic and institutional context. Indeed changes in the social causes of vulnerability often happen at much more rapid temporal scales than many environmental changes (Watts and Bohle, 1993).

The impacts of extreme climate events are the principal climate phenomenon which enhance vulnerability, though vulnerability refers to the outcomes of these impacts (Downing, 1991). Since it is climate extremes which are important, understanding of vulnerability to climate change should be based on the analysis of present day vulnerability informed by historical perspectives (Adger, 1996). High and uncertain impacts from extreme climate events are a global phenomenon and can only be ameliorated to a limited extent by technological advance and enhanced resources and income (Burton, Kates and White, 1993). Indeed, the institutional context of vulnerability to extreme events is a key determinant of vulnerability. As Ben Wisner highlighted 20 years ago, in the context of hazards more generally:

The systematic comparison of individual and societal response to disaster in social formations dominated by different modes of production (e.g., feudal, capitalist, socialist) is a potentially rich scientific undertaking, but one largely neglected (Wisner, 1978, p. 80).

The area has indeed remained largely neglected in the 20 years since then, as evidenced by recent assessments of physical vulnerability to climate change. The evidence assembled for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1995 Second Assessment Reports examines the potential climatic threats, but does so by concentrating on the regions or ecosystems which are threatened: forests, agriculture, and coastal regions for example. This approach, making both physical and social systems the object of analysis, is applied in the Second Assessment Report (Watson et al., 1996) to impacts on human health, water resources, ecosystems and physical infrastructure. For example, the IPCC report estimates that 46 million people per year are currently at risk from flooding due to storm surges in the world's coastal zones, and that climate change induced sea level rise, in the absence of adaptation, could double this figure (IPCC, 1996, p. 12). The IPCC assessment provides generic guidelines for appraising multiple threats in a single region, but does not, however, address what Wisner (1978)was alluding to: namely differentiated social vulnerability under different threats and under different economic and institutional circumstances; and the coevolution of those economies, institutions and social orders with the climate system.

The idea of social vulnerability to external change and stress is at the center of much research into human adaptation and interaction with the physical environment. This is particularly the case where social and natural scientists have attempted to explain the role of hazards and of periodic and extreme events. Human life and livelihood is at risk from natural phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, droughts, tsunamis and other hazards with human origins (e.g., Varley, 1994; Hewitt, 1997). In these cases vulnerability has been used to describe the state of exposure, usually associated with a geographical location rather than with individuals or social groups. In applying the concept of vulnerability to outcomes rather than impacts, vulnerability has also been examined in relation to food insecurity and famine (Downing, 1991; Watts and Bohle, 1993; Bohle, Downing and Watts, 1994).

Within social science approaches to hazards the concept of vulnerability has been developed by Hewitt (1983)and others, providing a challenge to what they regarded as a dominant view which described the causality of risk from hazards as “running from the physical environment to its social impacts” (Hewitt, 1983, p. 5). Thus even social science analysis of hazards, up till the 1980s, were primarily “technocratic” and prescriptive, by incorporating the human element in hazards as an input to designing planning, warning and coping systems. The radical reversal suggested by Hewitt (1983)and others, was to emphasize economic and social structure as a cause of vulnerability, rather than as a contribution to hazard mitigation. The causes of vulnerability to hazards under the Hewitt (1983)approach are therefore lack of access to resources: poverty and marginalization translate into vulnerability through the mechanisms of coping behavior and stress. The credence of this approach is reflected in later work by Kasperson et al. (1995), who review the concepts surrounding vulnerability in the context of an assessment of critical “regions at risk” from environmental change. They conclude that vulnerability “appears to be emerging as the most common term in… discussions of the differential susceptibility of social groups and individuals to losses from environmental change” (Kasperson et al., 1995, p. 11).

The origins of the use of vulnerability to describe the state of society environment interactions under stress lead to a number of general observations on vulnerability which can be applied in the climate change context. Vulnerability has an historical and time dimension; it is related to economic aspects of livelihood and land use; power and political dimensions are important in contextualizing vulnerability; and individuals and groups exhibit differential vulnerability. In addition, extreme events are the key climate change context. Thus vulnerability for individuals or groups can change over time; is differentiated between and within groups through their institutional and economic position; and is affected by environmental change. Existing policies and practices in agriculture, forestry and coastal resource management, as well as inequitable distribution of productive resources, in themselves can have perverse effects of increasing vulnerability, and hence can be “maladaptive” (Burton, 1997). Stress, under this definition, is associated with unplanned disruption and can incorporate the coping and recovery aspects of vulnerability.

The social vulnerability approach developed in this paper integrates both economic and other social science perspectives to vulnerability. It is also novel in applying these concepts in the context of long-term environmental change associated with climate change. The empirical research is based on present day risk rather than scenarios of future risks. Hence the model is relevant for climate risk assessment, and represents a departure from the approaches within assessments of the impacts of global climate change to date.

Section snippets

A definition

The essential features of a model of social vulnerability to climate change is first, that it focuses on social aspects of the phenomenon. An approach to vulnerability based on human welfare leads to environmental changes associated with climate change gaining significance when they have an impact on the relative and absolute well-being of individuals and groups: in the words of O'Keefe and colleagues (1976), “without people, there is no disaster.” A theory of vulnerability to climate change

Methods and data

Since Vietnam incorporates large fertile, low-lying and densely populated deltas of the Mekong and the Red Rivers and is subject to the impact of landfall typhoons, Vietnam would be classified as a region physically vulnerable to present day climate extremes and potentially to changes in the typhoon regime as a result of increased interannual climate variability in future. But Vietnam has diverse coastal regions, and an analysis of the climatic regime itself does not reveal the processes by

Conclusions

This paper has explored the causal factors of social vulnerability to climate change and present day climate extremes for one District in northern Vietnam. It has concentrated on the individual-level and collective-level vulnerability indicators to determine the vulnerability of the population of Xuan Thuy. In general the population exhibits resilience through its use of available natural resources, but the liberalization process has had, at best, an ambivalent impact on vulnerability as a

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