Indicators for Social and Economic Coping Capacity – Moving Toward at Working Definition of Adaptive Capacity

Gary Yohe () and Richard Tol

No FNU-8, Working Papers from Research unit Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University

Abstract: 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 judgements of six different adaptations that could reduce vulnerability in the Netherlands to increased flooding along the Rhine River.

Keywords: adaptive capacity; climate change (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2001-06, Revised 2001-06
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Published, Global Environmental Change, 12 (1), 25-40

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