Sarah Wolf

Clarifying vulnerability definitions and assessments using formalisation

The purpose of this paper is to present a formal framework of vulnerability to climate change, to address the conceptual confusion around vulnerability and related concepts. The framework was developed using the method of formalisation – making structure explicit. While mathematics as a precise and general language revealed common structures in a large number of vulnerability definitions and assessments, the framework is here presented by diagrams for a non‐mathematical audience. Vulnerability, in ordinary language, is a measure of possible future harm. Scientific vulnerability definitions from the fields of climate change, poverty, and natural hazards share and refine this structure. While theoretical definitions remain vague, operational definitions, that is, methodologies for assessing vulnerability, occur in three distinct types: evaluate harm for projected future evolutions, evaluate the current capacity to reduce harm, or combine the two. The framework identifies a lack of systematic relationship between theoretical and operational definitions. While much conceptual literature tries to clarify vulnerability, formalisation is a new method in this interdisciplinary field. The resulting framework is an analytical tool which supports clear communication: it helps when making assumptions explicit. The mismatch between theoretical and operational definitions is not made explicit in previous work.

Vulnerability and risk: comparing assessment approaches

The concepts vulnerability and risk are of great importance in the fields of climate change and natural hazards. Confusion is asserted in the terminology used by the respective communities, and a large conceptual literature has not solved this problem. This affects the communication within and between the two communities and the comparison of results from vulnerability and risk assessments. This paper argues that the main difference between methods to assess vulnerability and risk in the climate and the disaster communities is not a conceptual one, but rather different terminologies are used. This point is made using a formal framework of vulnerability to climate change that makes the structure of vulnerability and risk assessments explicit. The framework distinguishes three assessment approaches in the field of vulnerability to climate change, which recur—under different labels—in the risk assessment approaches analysed. While within each community, the same terms are ambiguously used to refer to more than one assessment approach, the confusion is enhanced between the two communities by using different labels for very similar approaches. As an application of the results, similarities and differences between two assessment tools are analysed: the Dynamic Interactive Vulnerability Assessment model (DIVA) for the case of vulnerability to climate change and the CATastrophe SIMulation model (CatSim) for risk of natural hazards.

A multi-agent model of several economic regions

This paper presents Lagom regiO: a multi-agent model of several growing economic areas in interaction. The model is part of the Lagom model family: economic multi-agent models developed to make steps toward understanding equilibrium selection and identifying win-win opportunities for climate policy. The particular feature of the model presented here is that it locates agents in one of a user-chosen number of regions. It can thus be used to represent diverse economic areas by specifying characteristics of agents and their interaction network as depending on their regions.

Framing climate vulnerability and adaptation at multiple levels: Addressing climate risks or institutional barriers in Lesotho?

Adaptation to climate change occurs largely through action at the local level, which is influenced by international and national levels of political and social organization. This article explores the impact of discourse at the international level on adaptation policy at the national and local level. Discourse defines which knowledge claims, methods and rationalities are accepted and reproduced by actors as a basis for policy development and implementation; this is called ‘framing’. Scientific literature defines adaptation and vulnerability in a general way and so accommodates different framings. This article reviews the history of the concepts of adaptation and vulnerability in the literature and their relation to development. Evidence is presented for the presence of two framings of CCIAV in the literature: the ‘decision-analytic’ and the ‘institutional-analytic’. Wetlands and climate-related projects in Lesotho are analysed and evidence is presented for the reproduction of the two framings. A decision-analytic framing favours projects focusing on technological solutions and reducing projected impacts. Conversely, institutional-analytic framing tends to produce projects that more explicitly include governance issues. It is concluded that framings exert a significant influence on policy when linked to, for example, sources of funding for adaptation. It is argued that methods linked to the ‘decision-analytic’ framing risk limiting the scope of effective adaptations.

Describing economic agent-based models – Dahlem ABM documentation guidelines

At the 100th Dahlem conference “New Approaches in Economics after the Financial Crisis” a working group devised guidelines for the documentation of computational economic agent-based models, based upon – but differing from – the ODD protocol Grimm et al. (2006, 2010). This paper sketches the motivation for coming up with a new set of guidelines tailored to economic multi-agent modelling, and presents these. While analytical economic models can often be precisely and concisely stated by a few equations together with an economic interpretation of their elements, a computational agentbased model, as a conceptual piece of work, may not always be a very tangible entity. For example, it is represented by but usually not identical to the (many) equations constituting the computer code. It is therefore not always easy to describe the model in a way that provides the reader with a thorough understanding of the model. The present guidelines are an attempt at standardizing such descriptions to support understanding and communication, as well as the comparability of economic multi-agent models.

Summary and Major Findings

People is the common theme in this part of the RACCM. The part gathers results from the CIRCE project that concern socio-ecological systems all around the Mediterranean. Due to the interdisciplinarity of the project, chapters in this part discuss climate change and societies from different perspectives, such as an economic, social science, or the health sector’s point of view. The chapters treat such diverse topics as socio-economic assessment, adaptive capacity and adaptation strategies, health, energy demand and mitigation options, water, tourism, retirement migration, and future options for the Mediterranean. Thus, this part offers a broad overview over aspects of human life in the Mediterranean region influenced by, and influencing, climate change. In the present section we first give a brief outline of the different chapters dealing with People, then indicate main findings about specific topics, and finally highlight some themes recurring through the different chapters.