New types of mapping tools have appeared in recent years that offer users the flexibility to explore vulnerability indicators themselves (albeit from a pre-selected list, though stakeholders can also help to define that list) as well as combining and weighting them according to their interest (e.g. Carter et al., 2010). Such tools place the definition of vulnerability firmly and more transparently in the hands of the user rather than the researcher, whose role is simply to compile the requisite data for analysis. This form of direct stakeholder participation may undermine at least one of the conclusions put forward in Hinkel’s critique of vulnerability assessment (Hinkel, 2011 – see above), that vulnerability indicators are not the right means to raise awareness of climate change due to the vagueness of the concept they express and because any information conveyed by the indicators has to be of relevance to stakeholders. Clearly, if the stakeholders select the indicators themselves and combine and map them according to their knowledge of a given situation, this would appear to present a real learning opportunity.
Whether the development of interactive vulnerability tools and the user-controlled learning they can promote should be regarded as scientific research (the sixth purpose of vulnerability assessment listed and dismissed by Hinkel above) may also merit further attention. Causality does not necessarily need to be explicitly represented by researchers to describe vulnerability; it can also be inferred subjectively, but still usefully by an expert user (for example, by comparing patterns of a given impact with patterns of candidate indicators that might contribute to those impacts). Moreover, study of user-decisions in such an environment might yield very useful insights into how stakeholders actually perceive vulnerability to climate change in the specific context in which they work.
