Vulnerability

Environmental Change

Vulnerability may also be considered in environmental terms. As climate change degrades the environment in which many people live, they find themselves required to migrate to other areas in which their traditional ways of life can no longer be sustained. On Banks Island in the Canadian Arctic, the Inuvialuit people are faced with the very rapid melting of the ice, which has been the basis of their landscape for all of their known history. New species of animals and insects are migrating farther north as temperatures increase, and buildings and roads are subsiding as foundations crumble.

The Inuvialuit people have been obliged to make rapid changes to their food-gathering strategies and to their forms of living. It is not yet known whether a newly constituted food chain will provide a sustainable source of protein sufficient to maintain human communities.

Combined with the process of desertification, millions of people across India and Pakistan have, in accordance with this trend, found themselves vulnerable to loss of livelihood and habitat. Places where they will be obliged to move will also be required to adapt to bearing a much higher population, and so services and facilities will be placed under pressure and food security lessened. The population of this area will also become vulnerable.

Climate change will produce a variety of complex and difficult-to-predict phenomena. A report considering changes that might affect Australia discusses not just increased temperature but also changes in the nature of sea currents, patterns of winds, increasing numbers of storms and bush fires, as well as reduced rainfall. Some combination of these changes will occur in the next 25 years, based on current use of carbon-emitting technologies. The severity of the changes will determine whether existing coastal settlements, including the largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, will still be inhabitable. Almost all of the population of Australia, which is predominantly concentrated in a few small coastal urban areas, has therefore become vulnerable to potential poverty.

Clearly, the less wealth people have before vulnerability strikes, the less likely it is that they will be able to avoid the health- or life-threatening problems that may affect them. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck parts of the southern United States in September 2005, demonstrated clearly that the urban poor of New Orleans, who were predominantly black, were much more severely affected than other sectors of society, because their housing was located in the most at-risk areas and because they did not have the ability to leave their homes and survive for an unknown period of time in a remote location. Around the world, therefore, the poor and those with low incomes are most vulnerable to environmental change and will suffer most from it.

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