Defining and assessing the risk of a territory being harmed by climate change

Abstract

This paper argues that, in order to assess the risk of being harmed by climate change, it would be useful methodologically to (i) confine the concept of vulnerability to natural factors and (ii) the concept of adaptation (or resilience) to man-made or policy induced factors. In addition this distinction would render the discussion more useful for policy. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 distinguishes between inherent and policy-induced realities, and presents four scenarios relating to these realities. Section 3 presents an attempt to measure the risk of being ahrmed by climate change on the basis of the distinction discussed in the previous sction. Section 4 concludes the paper with a summary of the methodological advantages relating to the approach proposed in the study.