University of Sussex
Browse

File(s) not publicly available

Indicators for social and economic coping capacity - Moving toward a working definition of adaptive capacity

journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-08, 11:09 authored by Gary Yohe, Richard TolRichard Tol
This paper offers a practically motivated method for evaluating systems' abilities to handle external stress. The method is designed to assess the potential contributions of various adaptation options to improving systems' coping capacities by focusing attention directly on the underlying determinants of adaptive capacity. The method should be sufficiently flexible to accommodate diverse applications whose contexts are location specific and path dependent without imposing the straightjacket constraints of a "one size fits all" cookbook approach. Nonetheless, the method should produce unitless indicators that can be employed to judge the relative vulnerabilities of diverse systems to multiple stresses and to their potential interactions. An artificial application is employed to describe the development of the method and to illustrate how it might be applied. Some empirical evidence is offered to underscore the significance of the determinants of adaptive capacity in determining vulnerability; these are the determinants upon which the method is constructed. The method is, finally, applied directly to expert judgments of six different adaptations that could reduce vulnerability in the Netherlands to increased flooding along the Rhine River.

History

Publication status

  • Published

Journal

Global Environmental Change

ISSN

0959-3780

Publisher

Elsevier

Issue

1

Volume

12

Page range

25-40

Department affiliated with

  • Economics Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2012-04-19

Usage metrics

    University of Sussex (Publications)

    Categories

    No categories selected

    Exports

    RefWorks
    BibTeX
    Ref. manager
    Endnote
    DataCite
    NLM
    DC