Introduction
Practitioners, policy analysts, consultants and researchers who wish to
assess climate change vulnerability, impacts and adaptation (VIA) are
currently confronted with a large number of concepts, methods,
frameworks, guidelines and toolboxes to choose from. Prominent
frameworks and guidelines have been developed, for example, by Carter
et al. (1994), Jones (2001), UNDP (2002), Turner et al. (2003),
Füssel and Klein (2006) and O’Brien et al. (2007).
Prominent examples of toolkits are the “Community Level Risk
Assessment Toolkit” maintained by the Provention Consortium
(Provention Consortium, 2006) and the “Compendium on Methods
and Tools to evaluate Impacts of, Vulnerability and Adaptation to,
Global Environmental Change” of the United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, 2006) as well as its follow up
activities under the “Nairobi work programme on impacts,
vulnerability and adaptation to climate change”.
This diversity reflects that there can not be a single approach to
CCVIA. CCVIA is assessed at all scales, for all sectors and across
policy domains. The systems, time-scales and questions considered are
diverse. Adaptation, for example, may refer to diverse human activities
such as mainstreaming climate adaptation into policy, raising dikes, or
helping communities to mobilise their own resources in order to adjust
themselves to an increasing frequency or intensity of
hydro-meteorological hazards. As a consequence, a diversity of methods
are applied including participatory, experimental, action-research,
decision-analytical, institutionanalytical and computer simulation
ones. The methods applied, which are described more fully later in this
guidance, stem from different scientific research traditions, research
fields and natural and social sciences disciplines.
Furthermore, addressing CCVIA is usually not a case of applying a
single method, but rather one of applying several methods. An impact
model, for example, might be applied to produce knowledge on climate
risks, a stakeholder workshop might then be conducted to elicit
possible adaptation responses to these and a multi-criteria analysis
might then be applied to evaluate options.
Despite or maybe due to this diversity, there is little guidance on
which approach is appropriate in a given situation. Toolboxes enumerate
a large number of methods but usually say little on which methods are
suitable when confronted with a particular case. In addition, a
multitude of abstract and often ambiguously defined concepts such as
vulnerability, risk, resilience, adaptive capacity are used to label
approaches and methods, which renders the selection of an appropriate
approach even more difficult.
Thi guidance on assessing CCVIA provides guidance on which approach is
applicable in which situation. A special emphasis is thus placed on the
first step in any assessment of VIA, namely, the framing of the
challenge to be addressed by the assessment. This step is crucial
because assessments carried out under the general labels of
“impact”, “vulnerability” or
“adaptation”, actually address very different types
of challenges.
In the face of the diversity of challenges, this guidance does not
provide a single entry point to assessing VIA but multiple ones
depending on the type of challenge that the analyst is facing. The idea
is that a national-level policy analyst who is facing the challenge of
developing a national strategy for adaptation requires a different
entry point to VIA than an engineer confronted with the challenge of
deciding by how much to raise a dike or a development practitioner
trying to promote adaptation actions in a community that experiences
frequent floods.
Note that this guidance restrict itself to assessments of VIA that aim
to contribute to human adaptation. We consider only methods related to
assessing impacts or vulnerability that serve, either directly or
indirectly, the goal of adaptation. We exclude those impact and
vulnerability assessments that are carried out for other goals such as,
for example, to establish mitigation targets.
