Enquiry question: What are the disparities in exposure to climate change risk and vulnerability?
Subject guide
Disparities in exposure to climate change risk and vulnerability, including variations in people’s location, wealth, social differences (age, gender, education), risk perception
Subject guide
Disparities in exposure to climate change risk and vulnerability, including variations in people’s location, wealth, social differences (age, gender, education), risk perception
- Detailed examples of two or more societies with contrasting vulnerability
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Vulnerability
Vulnerability refers to the degree to which people or the things they value are susceptible to, or are unable to cope with, the adverse impacts of climate change. Thus, vulnerability determines how severe the impacts of climate change might be.
There are three dimensions of vulnerability to climate change: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.
Some groups of people are inherently more vulnerable to climate change than others. The very old or very young, the sick, and the physically or mentally challenged are vulnerable. Disadvantaged groups, such as minorities, those with few educational opportunities, or non-English speakers are more vulnerable than the majority, better-educated, English-speaking population. Women, who typically spend more time and effort on care-giving to parents, children, and the sick than men do, are more vulnerable because that care-giving exposes them more to the impacts of climate change. More vulnerable groups often combine these categories, such as the poor—who can be old, minority, non-English speaking, and female, for example. Another example of a particularly vulnerable group is the single-mother household, which can be headed by a poor woman of color who is responsible not only for caregiving, but also for providing the family income.
There are three dimensions of vulnerability to climate change: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.
- Exposure is the degree to which people and the things they value could be exposed to climate variation or change;
- Sensitivity is the degree to which they could be harmed by that exposure; and
- Adaptive capacity is the degree to which they could mitigate the potential for harm by taking action to reduce exposure or sensitivity.
Some groups of people are inherently more vulnerable to climate change than others. The very old or very young, the sick, and the physically or mentally challenged are vulnerable. Disadvantaged groups, such as minorities, those with few educational opportunities, or non-English speakers are more vulnerable than the majority, better-educated, English-speaking population. Women, who typically spend more time and effort on care-giving to parents, children, and the sick than men do, are more vulnerable because that care-giving exposes them more to the impacts of climate change. More vulnerable groups often combine these categories, such as the poor—who can be old, minority, non-English speaking, and female, for example. Another example of a particularly vulnerable group is the single-mother household, which can be headed by a poor woman of color who is responsible not only for caregiving, but also for providing the family income.
The concept of resilience is important to understanding adaptive capacity to climate change. Resilience refers to the ability of a human system to withstand contemporary shocks and to anticipate and plan for future shocks. Resilient systems have the ability to learn from past experiences and to use that knowledge when confronting problems. Systems with high adaptive capacity are therefore resilient and able to reconfigure themselves to deal with climate change. Systems with low adaptive capacity are much less resilient and much more vulnerable to climate change.
Measuring vulnerability
Indigenous cultures in the Arctic
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London
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Philippines
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Kiribati
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Bangladesh:
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Task:
Climate change and location
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Questions to consider:
- What is the pattern shown in the CCVI and the CRI? What are the similarities? Why are they different?
- Why are there so many different methodologies for examining the risk to a particular location?
- What are the factors that are connected to location which affect the extent to which populations are vulnerable to climate change (SEEP)?
- What do they all have in common in terms of overall conclusions
Climate change vulnerability and Demographics
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reading-_climate_change_vulnerability.pdf | |
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The UNDP states that “99% of the casualties from climate change will be in developing countries”.
Using the information below, attached reading (p195-196) and in the textbooks explain how the following demographic groups within those countries will be disproportionately affected by climate change:
•Poorer people (3 reason)
•Women (8 reasons)
•Old people (2 reasons)
•Children (1 reason)
Add any of the theory about disparities within demographic groups to the 2 'contrasting vulnerability' case studies
Using the information below, attached reading (p195-196) and in the textbooks explain how the following demographic groups within those countries will be disproportionately affected by climate change:
•Poorer people (3 reason)
•Women (8 reasons)
•Old people (2 reasons)
•Children (1 reason)
Add any of the theory about disparities within demographic groups to the 2 'contrasting vulnerability' case studies
Climate change and wealth
- Why are poorer people more vulnerable to climate change?
- Why are the poorer people more vulnerable within countries?
- Why are poorer countries more at risk?
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Climate change and age
Why are older people and children more vulnerable to climate change?
Climate change and gender
- Why are women more vulnerable than men to the effects of climate change?
- Do you believe that this is true in High Income Countries as well as Low Income Countries?
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undp_linkages_gender_and_cc_policy_brief_1-web.pdf | |
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Climate change and education
- What are the roles of both formal and informal education in affecting how prepared an individual or community will be to the effects of climate change?
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233083e.pdf | |
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Climate change and risk perception
![Picture](/uploads/1/0/6/7/106702859/screen-shot-2018-06-03-at-2-25-00-pm_orig.png)
What is it?
Why is risk perception important?
How do you rate your own perception of the risks from climate change? Can you explain this using the factors which affect risk perception?
Factors affecting risk perception:
Why is risk perception important?
How do you rate your own perception of the risks from climate change? Can you explain this using the factors which affect risk perception?
Factors affecting risk perception:
- Extent of factual knowledge/data
- Level of personal threat
- Immediacy of the risk
- Extent to which the risk can be controlled
- Extent to which person/community is open to changing ideas.
Example question
’The world’s poorer countries are least responsible for climate change and have the most to lose because of it.’ To what extent do you agree with this statement? (10 marks)
Content mapping
There is now a large amount of material that can be drawn on to help answer the above essay. The answer could include a range of case studies, concepts and theories from the whole of the paper 2 course so far. Create a coogle mind map to draw links between the content that may support this answer.