Abstracts
Resource System Vulnerability to Climate Change: Assessment Methodology
Yongyuan Yin1, Nicholas Clinton, Bing Luo
1University of British Columbia
yongyuan.yin@sdri.ubc.ca
The current status of climate vulnerability research and vulnerability assessment show a lack of designing new methods to meet the increasing demand of policy makers. The main goal of vulnerability assessment is to develop effective methods to measure vulnerability and to assess the environmental risks in dealing with climate stresses. In this study, several major factors which influence resource system vulnerability in a watershed will be considered. In other words, resource vulnerability is a function of these factors including: climate, economic activities in the region, land users, size of resource use activities, resource use efficiency, the price elasticity of supply and demand, environmental protection, policy options (economical, technical, or policy), lifestyle associated with income increasing, and population growth.
This paper focuses on methodology development for land and water system vulnerability assessment. The paper introduces methods for the formulation of indicators for agricultural land and water resource system vulnerability to climate variation and change. Indicators are discussed in relation to their specificity, descriptive power, thresholds, and capacity for geographic allocation using ancillary or modeled data. Resource system vulnerability is addressed with a description of applicable indicators, literature references, and geo-spatial data requirements for the mapping of the indicators
.2005-04-05 |
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