Iied dbsa project

7.4 Tools for vulnerability assessment

Climate change threatens to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and create new ones for poor people. Thus vulnerability assessment is one of the most important emerging tools that serves as a critical basis for effective adaptation responses. As the AIACC Project has pointed out, if the needs of the most vulnerable people are prioritised in national decision making, then small-scale, community-level strategies will be needed to supplement the large-scale, technical approach that is likely to dominate adaptation planning⁴⁸. However, there is a need firstly to map and prioritise vulnerability, and secondly to provide decision-makers with information on these small-scale strategies.

The most vulnerable people will be particularly hard hit by climate change impacts. Climate change also poses threats to the provision by ecosystems of critical services. Where vulnerability hotspots coincide with climate-sensitive areas, as appears to be the case in the UMKhanyakude District in KwaZulu-Natal, the effects on people can be very severe. Oxfam Australia has explored perceptions of and responses to climate change as part of an ongoing partnership in this district where poverty levels are around 77%, the malaria incidence is the highest in South Africa and there are very high levels of HIV and AIDS and child-headed households. The following extract illustrates the situation of multiple stressors on an already highly vulnerable population.
“The increasing prevalence of OVCs is having a dramatic impact on communities with many child-headed households and extended families failing to cope with fewer resources. With little access to water and a lack of infrastructure communities are forced to find water where they can and this at times means fetching water from polluted sources. If drought conditions continue and infrastructure does not improve, the situation for these communities will become untenable.” Sterret, 2007:19

While vulnerability assessment itself can be seen as an important tool, it makes use of a range of methods, such as institutional analysis, oral histories, vulnerability mapping and developing vulnerability indicators.⁴⁹

Resilience indicators are also receiving greater emphasis – for example two case studies in the first phase of the Climate Change, Vulnerable Communities and Adaptation project used locally-derived resilience indicators based on critical livelihood assets to measure community resilience, within a sustainable livelihoods approach⁵⁰. Important work has been done by research organisations, but for rollout, vulnerability studies need to move out of the realms of academia.⁵¹ Municipal-level vulnerability assessment should be a required component of the IDP. For this to happen, we need to develop rapid assessment methodologies, and enhance capacity at the local level. As the Vhembe case study indicates, strategies employed by farmers to deal with stresses they face are multi-dimensional and thus policy or support that focuses on climate stress alone will not reduce vulnerability.

8. Conclusions and recommendations

As recognised by the IPCC⁵², evidence suggests that climate change adaptation processes and actions face significant limitations, especially in vulnerable nations and communities. As noted above, adaptation measures are seldom undertaken in response to climate change alone. In some cases, adaptation activities are undertaken by individuals, while other types of adaptation are planned and implemented by governments on behalf of societies, mostly in response to experienced climatic events, especially extremes. The recent Fourth Assessment report notes significant barriers to implementing adaptation, including the inability of natural systems to adapt to the rate and magnitude of climate change; as well as technological, financial, cognitive and behavioural, and social and cultural constraints. There are also significant knowledge gaps for adaptation as well as impediments to flows of knowledge and information relevant for adaptation decisions.

Smit (2004) lists the following range of tools that could be important for adaptation mainstreaming: benefit cost analysis, cost effectiveness analysis, multiple criteria evaluation, social accounting matrices, general equilibrium modelling, risk assessment and risk management, sustainable livelihoods approach, and participatory vulnerability assessment. Adaptation in its entirety is a broad landscape for which a range of tools would be needed, too broad for the scope of this study. This initial exploration into tools for integrating adaptation into planning and development in South Africa has revealed a more limited number of areas of good practice, as are emerging from actual local pilot projects. Three key areas for effective tools for integrating adaptation to climate change at the local and community level are particularly important:

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  Participatory methodologies for making better links between climate science and local knowledge and practices, so that local communities have the information and resources they need to take effective action to protect their livelihoods and ecosystems from the effects of climate change
  
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  Action learning approaches and the use of the sustainable livelihoods framework are key elements for successful local adaptation strategies, and should underpin the more formal tools and methodologies for integration, of which evolving vulnerability assessment methodologies are fundamentally important.
  
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  Monitoring and evaluation, and in particular participatory monitoring and evaluation involving local users, which feeds back into an action learning approach at different levels, is essential for the kind of rapid responses and learning-by-doing that will be required to address climate change impacts in a proactive fashion.
  

While detailed recommendations are beyond the scope of a brief desk-top study, some obvious suggestions are:

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  Development planning at all levels needs to take a longer-term view and to incorporate predicted climate change in order to minimise impacts. Specifically, simple mechanisms need to be found to integrate climate change and indeed sustainability issues in general into local-level planning, such as the IDP in South Africa.
  
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  Adaptation measures undertaken by local communities should be encouraged and promoted through policies that acknowledge the need for flexibility and locally-specific solutions. Participatory action learning approaches and the sustainable livelihoods framework should form an essential component of the adaptation approach, and should receive policy support.
  
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  A range of integrative tools that factor in complexity and flexibility need to be employed. Appropriate tools need to be simple yet effective, or they will not be used widely. Additional thought is needed on what the most effective tools are for different levels and how these need to be adapted and rolled out more widely.
  
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  Vulnerability mapping and assessment is a critical step in upscaling support to the evolving adaptation strategies of poor and marginalised people at the local level. Rapid methodologies and policy emphasis are needed to move this beyond the pilot project stage.