Climate change impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016

Introduction
Article 4.4 of the UNFCCC states that countries that
are 'particularly vulnerable' to climate change should
receive assistance for meeting the costs of adaptation.
A sensible interpretation of this term requires
consideration of the potential impacts as well as
the adaptive capacity of countries, i.e. an integrated
concept of vulnerability to climate change. However,
such integration is highly sensitive to subjective
preferences (Klein, 2009). Furthermore, the integration
of climatic, environmental, economic and political
factors into a single vulnerability score can obscure
the key reasons why a particular country (or region,
sector or population group) is more vulnerable than
another, and thus compromise the development of
effective adaptation and risk management measures.
For example, increased flood risks may be caused by
changes in extreme weather events, or by development
in flood plains, or by a combination of these (and other)
factors. The differentiation of factors behind observed
or projected increases in climate-related risks can be
facilitated by other conceptualisations of vulnerability
and risk, such as those employed by the disaster risk
community.
Standard applications of disaster risk assessment
are primarily concerned with short-term (discrete)
natural hazards, and assume that hazards are known
and current vulnerabilities are static (Downing et al.,
1999). The disaster risk approach distinguishes
clearly between two determinants of risk to a system:
exposure to a hazard (a potentially damaging
physical event, phenomenon or human activity) and
vulnerability (which denotes the relationship between
the severity of the hazard and the degree of damage
caused to an exposed element) (UN, 2004). An example
of the recent application of this concept at the
pan‐European scale is presented in Section 6.2.
Additional definitions of vulnerability (and other
terms) have been developed in a range of disciplines
(e.g. ecology, epidemiology and social sciences). As
a result, different terms have been used to describe
similar concepts and the same term has been used
to describe different concepts (O'Brien et al., 2007;
Füssel, 2007; Birkmann and UNU-EHS Expert Working
Group on Measuring Vulnerability, 2013, Chapter 23).
For example, the indicators used to determine
'vulnerability' in the disaster risk context are often
quite similar to those describing the 'sensitivity' of
the system's components to climatic stimuli, and
(integrated) vulnerability in the climate change context
is sometimes used in a similar way to 'risk' in disaster
risk assessment (Costa and Kropp, 2013). In addition,
findings described as 'vulnerabilities' in some studies
Figure 1.5
An integrated framework for the risk of climate-related impacts
IMPACTS
CLIMATE
Vulnerability
SOCIO-ECONOMIC
PROCESSES
Natural
variability
Hazards
RISK
Key
Emergent
Socio-economic
pathways
Adaptation and
mitigation
actions
Anthropogenic
climate change
Governance
Exposure
EMISSIONS
and land-use change
Source:
IPCC, 2014a (Figure SPM.1). © 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Reproduced with permission.
48 Climate change, impacts and vulnerability in Europe 2016 | An indicator-based report