Vulnerability assessments : a review of approaches

This review assessed the suitability of various frameworks, approaches and tools for conducting vulnerability assessments, for use in the EU funded IUCN project “Building Resilience to Climate Change in Coastal Southeast Asia”. In particular their suitability for use at the provincial, community, and household/individual levels of analysis was emphasised. The majority of Vulnerability Assessments (VAs) treat vulnerability as a measure of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the system or system component in question; setting guidelines to measure each attribute. This review considers the suitability of IUCN’s own coastal-context vulnerability assessment framework, CARE’s Climate Vulnerability and Capacity Analysis (CVCA), the World Bank risk-based Vulnerability Analysis for Freshwater Ecosystems, Community-based Risk Screening Tool Adaptation and Livelihoods (CRiSTAL) and Dynamic Interactive Vulnerability Analysis (DIVA).