Two faces of vulnerability: Distinguishing susceptibility to harm and system resilience in climate adaptation
Abstract
In the climate adaptation literature, we can distinguish two seemingly distinct frameworks for the concept of vulnerability. We might think of vulnerability in terms of susceptibility to harm. Some discussions of vulnerability accordingly focus on the risk posed to well-being. Alternatively, we might think of vulnerability in terms of a system's responsiveness to adverse conditions, often spelled out in terms of resilience. This article highlights and distinguishes these frameworks through a brief survey of climate adaptation literature. Understanding the relationship between these two frameworks is vital not only for conceptual clarity, but also for developing adaptation strategies that respond to the different sorts of vulnerabilities posed by climate change. Mitigating the vulnerability of an individual at risk of harm might well complicate efforts at mitigating the vulnerabilities of systems in which that individual is embedded. Humans are clearly at risk of harm from a changing climate, and changing climate challenges the resilience of systems on which humans depend. The paper concludes with a brief consideration of the vulnerabilities that arise from the dissociation of people from their environments. Dissociation, whether through the migration of people or through changes to environmental background conditions not only makes clear the dual nature of vulnerabilities, but also serves as a lens through which we might consider the prospects for integrating a more cohesive account of vulnerability into successful climate adaptation strategies.
This article is categorized under:
- Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change
- Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Values-Based Approach to Vulnerability and Adaptation
Graphical Abstract
As we adapt to climate change, how should we support both fisher and fishery? Climate change will both increase individual susceptibility to harm and compromise the resilience of the economic and ecological systems on which we all depend. Climate adaptation policy must recognize that these constitute different forms of vulnerability, and develop strategies for addressing both (photo credit: Jennifer Enge-Shockley).
1 INTRODUCTION
Climate change exacerbates vulnerabilities. From sea level rise to wide-ranging aridification and changing precipitation patterns, humans are vulnerable to changes in the environmental systems on which they depend. In the arena of climate change adaptation, it is frequently said that humans and ecological systems are both vulnerable to changes in the climatic system. Yet while there is near uniform agreement that climate change increases vulnerability, the underlying concept suffers from ambiguity. Vulnerability is variously treated as susceptibility to harm and as compromised system resilience; this leads to problems both in understanding vulnerability and in developing policy responses to mitigate vulnerabilities.
After briefly surveying uses of vulnerability in the literature, I will argue that there are two general ways of thinking about vulnerability in climate change adaptation contexts, and that these two ways, these two faces of vulnerability, rely on different normative frameworks. Accordingly, they may warrant different remedies. We might wonder, for example, how to respond to the vulnerabilities of the fisher without compromising the fishery? Or how we might respond to the vulnerabilities of the fishery without compromising the fisher? With this contrast in mind, I will explore variations within each of these expressions of vulnerability. I will then briefly consider the relationship between risk and vulnerability in the context of climate adaptation. One might think that, given all the ambiguity associated with vulnerability, perhaps it would be better to eschew vulnerability as a guiding concept, and rely on risk. I will suggest that such a move would be misguided. I will then discuss one particular point of overlap between the two faces of vulnerability—the dissociation of people from place. I will briefly conclude with a lesson taken from dissociation—that points of commonality between our two faces of vulnerability should be the foci of our adaptation strategies.
2 BACKGROUND
This is not the first study pointing to the range of meanings associated with vulnerability (Adger, 2006; Brown et al., 2017; Ford et al., 2018; MacKenzie et al., 2014; Thomas et al., 2019). For Brown et al. (2017, see also Mackenzie, Rogers, & Dodds, 2014) the general frame of vulnerability provides a means of characterizing the susceptibility of individuals to be harmed. This approach follows closely on the classic discussion of vulnerability in Wisner et al.'s At Risk (Wisner et al., 2004), where vulnerability is understood in terms of the “potential for ‘ill-being’” being visited on individuals or groups (Wisner et al., 2004, p. 14); and this approach echoes more recent calls to ensure the vulnerability of people remains the focus of adaptation and development strategies (Tschakert et al., 2017). Yet in their survey of the various ways in which vulnerability has been used in philosophical, political, and legal contexts, Brown et al. (2017) raise the general concern that the “vagueness” and “malleability” of the term leads not only to conceptual confusion, but also to policy problems (see also Ecclestone & Lewis, 2014; Furedi, 2008). Failing to specify the relevant notion of vulnerability may lead to policy efforts that fail to protect the interests of vulnerable populations. Indeed, the vagueness of vulnerability has led at least one theorist (Wrigley, 2015) to advocate for eliminating use of the term altogether. But appeals to vulnerability are too closely tied to understandings of right and wrong action, and to evaluation of the effects of actions and policies, to be eliminated easily. Despite its vagueries and malleability understanding vulnerability as susceptibility to harm appears to play an important role in policy. But it is just one approach to vulnerability.
Smit et al. (1999) understand vulnerability to be a property of systems and take systemic vulnerability to be a central concern in developing adaptation strategies. This systemic focus is reflected in the third IPCC report, where vulnerability was defined as the “[d]egree to which a system is susceptible to injury, damage, or harm (one part—the problematic or detrimental part—of sensitivity)” (Smit et al., 2001, p. 894). While there is a reference to harm in this definition, appeals to injury and harm seem only indirectly tied to the system itself. The concern seems to be with those who are harmed because of the vulnerabilities of the system.
Of course, the complexities associated with the various interpretations of vulnerability are acknowledged in this literature. Adger (referencing Hewitt, 1997 among others) refers to a “paradox deriv[ing] from two faces of vulnerability—a state of ‘powerlessness and endangerment’ and the recognition of the ability of social–ecological systems to adapt to changing circumstances” (Adger, 2006, p. 274, emphasis mine). For Adger, appeals to vulnerability focus our attention on the resilience of systems. He rightly identifies two faces of vulnerability within the resilience literature. Vulnerability is seen as both powerlessness and potential. While both expressions of vulnerability are grounded in properties of systems, the expressions range substantially in their practical significance: powerless encourages responses to minimize vulnerabilities, potential encourages a more nuanced, context-sensitive response.
Others express concern not that “vulnerability” has expanded in application, but that a deviation of the concept, one that risks minimizing its normative significance, has become prominent. According to this concern, the focus on system resilience does not amount to a different expression or form of vulnerability, but rather a shift, in the adaptation discourse, away from vulnerability. Tschakert and Tuana (2013, p. 78; see also Cannon, 1994) worry that the concept of power, central to a vulnerability framing, might be occluded by a shift to a resilience framing. Their “situated resilience” response is a complement to the present paper's concern that vulnerability is expressed in different ways, and, whether or not they are endorsed as legitimate, we must at least acknowledge the variety of expressions of “vulnerability.”
It is worth emphasizing that the ambiguity around “vulnerability” is not merely a conceptual concern. The Sixth Assessment Review of the Second Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2022) uses a conjoined definition of vulnerability: “Vulnerability in this report is defined as the propensity or predisposition to be adversely affected and encompasses a variety of concepts and elements including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm and lack of capacity to cope and adapt” (IPCC, 2022, pp. 1–18). This complex definition, one reflected in the climate adaptation literature more broadly, appeals to two frameworks for conceiving of vulnerability; those frameworks may not be commensurate, and being inattentive to their differences may be problematic in practice.
Crosweller and Tschakert's (2021) (see also Lahsen & Ribot, 2021; Tschakert & Tuana, 2013) discussion of individualist and communitarian responses to climate change also reflects the dangers of not attending to different expressions of vulnerability. While not the focus of their study, their finding that foregrounding individual responsibility correlated with a lack of focus on systemic responses anticipates a contrast between the vulnerability of communities and related systems, and vulnerability as susceptibility of individuals to harm. Responses to one dimension may compromises recognizing the other. Efforts to address the vulnerabilities faced by the fisher may lead to strategies (say, more durable or adaptable equipment) that exacerbate the vulnerabilities faced by the fishery (say, a reduction in fish populations). Failing to acknowledge different expressions of vulnerability risks the implementation of conflicting remediation strategies. Further, these worries are reflected in recent work on maladaptation, that is, the concern that adaptation strategies might result in creating, unjustly redistributing, or aggravating existing vulnerabilities (Eriksen et al., 2021; Magnan et al., 2016; Schipper, 2020). I suggest that recognizing the two faces of vulnerability puts at the forefront of our adaptation strategies the need for complementary strategies for addressing those vulnerabilities. Our adaptation strategies should acknowledge vulnerabilities of both fisher and fishery.
3 VULNERABILITIES
3.1 Susceptibility to harm
I suggest that these two general approaches to vulnerability, one grounded in concerns over the resilience of systems and the other grounded in concerns over threats to well-being, reflect two faces of vulnerability. These two faces, which are not quite the two faces of vulnerability referenced by Adger (2006), are best distinguished by recognizing what they take to be the adverse condition vulnerability threatens. One face of vulnerability is concerned with susceptibility to harm. For example, appropriate housing mitigates vulnerability to cold (Jones & Mays, 2016). Fishers are vulnerable to harm, both economic and physical, from changing water temperatures (Fiorella et al., 2021). Individual human beings are vulnerable to temperatures above which the body cannot self-regulate. A tree might be vulnerable to a particular blight.
Robert Goodin characterizes the essence of this view: “Conceptually, ‘vulnerability’ is essentially a matter of being under threat from harm; therefore, protecting the vulnerable is primarily a matter of forestalling threatened harms” (Goodin, 1986, p. 110). The harms we are to forestall, if we are to protect the vulnerable, amount to the undermining of interests (following Feinberg's (1984) standard account of harm). Accordingly, the sort of vulnerability with which Goodin is concerned is applicable to the sorts of things that have interests, primarily individual humans. Similarly, vulnerability in medical contexts is understood to indicate “a position of relative disadvantage, which requires a person to trust and depend upon others.” (Oxford Concise Medical Dictionary, 2020). Note here the explicit appeal to individual persons, and the implicit reference to risk of harm. But harm comes in many forms, and vulnerability is expressed in equally many forms.
MacKenzie et al. (2014) helpfully distinguish between universal and relational vulnerabilities. One might consider vulnerability in terms of a universal concern, say, the capacity to suffer. As we all have this capacity, this vulnerability is one we all have, even if it is expressed differently across different circumstances. This we might think of as “universal vulnerability” (Butler, 2004, 2009; Fineman, 2008; MacIntyre, 1999; MacKenzie et al., 2014; Nussbaum, 1992). Alternatively, one might think of vulnerability in terms of “the contingent susceptibility of particular persons or groups to specific kinds of harm or threat by others” (MacKenzie et al., 2014, p. 6). This understanding takes our vulnerabilities to be defined in terms of our relations to others. This “social or relational” (MacKenzie et al., 2014, p. 6) vulnerability is the sort we are often concerned about in interpersonal relationships, in our social environments, and in many biomedical contexts (Boldt, 2019). While we might think of humans as being vulnerable—simply as a fact of existence—say vulnerable to our physical frailty—most appeals to vulnerability, and certainly appeals that reflect moral concern, involve vulnerability with respect to some actual or possible stressor, typically tied to other individuals or systems on which those individuals depend. On this read, vulnerability is a signifier of a dependence on another in a manner that may compromise an individual's autonomy: for example, an abusive partner who maintains emotional control. The presumptive tie between vulnerability and autonomy has generated a body of literature grounded in feminist reconstructions of both concepts and encourages a more relational understanding. For example, one might be concerned that vulnerability, in the individual case, involves the undermining of the autonomous individual or emphasizes the dependency of one individual on another and, accordingly, appears tied to helplessness and victimhood (MacKenzie et al., 2014, p. 33; see also Tschakert & Tuana, 2013). However, some authors have responded that this only follows if we understand the autonomous individual as an independent rational actor (Fineman, 2008, 2010). If we think of autonomy relationally, as a condition of being in the world together such that autonomy, and so vulnerability, is about our interdependence, then vulnerability need not present as a matter of comparative helplessness.
The normative significance of relational approaches to vulnerability can be seen in Vrousalis' (2013) distinction between absolute vulnerability (corresponding roughly to MacKenzie et al.'s appeal to universal vulnerability) and relational vulnerability. Absolute vulnerability indicates “a substantial risk of a significant loss in the relevant metric (welfare, resources, capabilities, and so on)” (Vrousalis, 2013, p. 133). Whereas absolute vulnerability need not make “essential reference to an agent's power over another,” relational vulnerability does make such essential reference (Vrousalis, 2013, p. 133). To use Vrousalis' example, to be in a deep pit where mudslides occur puts one in a condition of absolute vulnerability. To be in that same pit, with another individual holding a rope capable of extracting one from that pit, puts one in a condition of relational vulnerability.
The relational themes seen in MacKenzie and Vrousalis are also seen in the literature linking vulnerability to environmental justice. While the extensive writings on environmental justice in the context of climate adaptation are well beyond the scope of this work (but see Schlosberg & Collins, 2014), it is worth noting that beyond the comparative disadvantage approach to distributive justice (where the interpersonal vulnerabilities are readily apparent), we can see concerns over vulnerability in the failure to provide voice or otherwise include the disadvantaged (recognitional justice), in the failure to integrate structures that do not disadvantage one group over another (procedural justice), and in the failure to provide mechanisms to recover from vulnerabilities suffered (restorative justice). We see this, for example, regarding vulnerability and climate justice generally (Shue, 2014), regarding the challenge to relationships generated by climate change and our attendant responsibilities (Cuomo, 2011), regarding the relationship between the more than human environment and anthropogenic climate change (Holland, 2014), and regarding our failure to acknowledge and rectify our harm to indigenous populations and in our failure to give voice and learn from indigenous people's experience (Whyte, 2013). The point for our purposes here is that the vulnerabilities about which we are generally concerned—typically involving matters of justice or moral concern—will be relative vulnerabilities. And relational accounts of vulnerability generally rest on the susceptibility of individuals to harm. Accordingly, a comprehensive treatment of vulnerability will need to include appeals to the susceptibility to harm. Failing to do so involves failing to make the vital connection between vulnerability and interpersonal relationships, between vulnerability and power, and between vulnerability and justice.
3.2 System resilience
Yet, as we saw above, vulnerability has a different face, one concerned with the capacity of a system to recover from perturbations. That is, in some contexts vulnerability is thought of in terms of system resilience (Côté & Darling, 2010). It is well established that socio-ecological systems are vulnerable to climate change (Cinner & Barnes, 2019). Predictably, such an approach is commonplace in climate adaptation discussions surrounding ecological and economic systems. This notion of vulnerability can also be seen, for just two of many examples, in recent investigations as to how burned forest landscapes are vulnerable to flooding and landslides (CDC, n.d.; Ghorbanzadeh et al., 2019; Skilodimou et al., 2021) and in studies of the effects of climate change on mangrove marine ecosystems (Friess et al., 2022; Ward et al., 2016). A similar approach to vulnerability with a focus on socio-ecological systems is seen in Adger (2006), Miller et al. (2010), and in the early IPCC definitions (before the IPCC acknowledged the importance of harm, and conjoined both faces of vulnerability into their more recent, conjunctive definition). As Adger puts it, “the concept of vulnerability has been a powerful analytic tool for describing states of susceptibility to harm, powerlessness, and marginality of both physical and social systems, and for guiding normative analysis of actions to enhance well-being through reduction of risk” (Adger, 2006, p. 268). Note that the reference to harm here is derivative, as systems are not themselves bearers of well-being or ill-being, and so not susceptible to harm in any clear way. While concerns over harm inflicted as a result of climate change are central to his discussion, Adger's focus is on the “degree to which a system is susceptible to and is unable to cope with adverse effects” (Adger, 2006, p. 269). The appeals to harm, which we see repeated throughout Adger's review, are largely a matter of the harms that result from failures of system resilience. Vulnerability, for Adger as for much of the social science literature, is a matter of system resilience, and a property of systems.
Similarly, Smit and Wandel understand vulnerability to be framed in terms of the balance between exposure and sensitivity, on the one hand, and adaptive capacity, on the other. They argue that “the vulnerability of any system (at any scale) is a reflection of (or a function of) the exposure and sensitivity of that system to hazardous conditions and the ability or capacity or resilience of the system to cope, adapt, or recover from the effects of those conditions” (Smit & Wandel, 2006, p. 286; see also Thomas et al., 2019). The overarching theme of their comprehensive review is that vulnerability provides a helpful frame for understanding the adaptive capacities of communities, both human and socio-ecological, under the pressures of climate change. Similarly, while the focus of Thomas et al. (2019) is on the way that individuals and groups are harmed, the framing of vulnerability is in terms of the mismatch between those individuals and groups, and the systems on which they depend. Vulnerability is identified as a property of systems.
Where we might respond to vulnerabilities of systems, understood in terms of their resilience, by shoring up the capacity of those systems to recover from shocks (say, reforestation), responding to vulnerabilities of systems as they adapt and respond to changing circumstances has led to work on vulnerability in terms of the interactions between systems. Recent work on complex adaptive systems has explored vulnerability by considering the sensitivity of systems to “continuous interaction of multiple exogenous and endogenous stressors.” (Naylor et al., 2020, p. 253). This approach (anticipated in Cannon & Müller-Mahn, 2010) uses the intersections and points of contact between systems to identify points of vulnerability, and so points where adaptive strategies might best be implemented. This is of particular relevance as we consider how climate change causes systems to be decreasingly well connected (e.g., climate change may lead to ecological systems that are less well suited to agricultural systems). There is a very real sense, made apparent in studies of system resilience and obvious from the near uniform understanding that the scale of climate change exacerbates vulnerabilities, that vulnerabilities faced by humans are no longer local or regional, but global. Recognizing how the complex systems that shape our social and ecological world intersect with one another may prove vital as we identify strategies to minimize risk to humans, both individually and collectively. But while this approach provides us with a technical model for the use of vulnerability without defining the term formally, it largely takes on board a definition of vulnerability grounded in system resilience. Further, some have raised concerns that the reliance on ecological systems as our model for vulnerability and adaptation more generally risks failing to recognize the important human dimensions of climate adaptation, including matters of justice and the range of distinctively human harms (loss of place, severing of interpersonal relationships) to which individuals might be subject (Cannon & Müller-Mahn, 2010; see also Crosweller & Tschakert, 2021; Tschakert & Tuana, 2013; Tschakert et al., 2013, 2017).
As made apparent by these concerns, the systemic approach advanced in these overviews, and reflected in the complex adaptive system literature and in the social science literature more broadly, provides a different analysis of vulnerability than the harm-based approach. To see this contrast, consider the uses of vulnerability in the following: as a result of the vulnerability of an ecological system (fisheries) to changing water temperature, individual fishers are vulnerable to an increased threat of hunger, and the resultant harms. Efforts to respond to the fisher's susceptibility to the harm of hunger may compromise an already unstable fishery. Efforts to buttress the resilience of a fishery may exacerbate the fisher's susceptibility to hunger. Both faces of vulnerability appear—both fishery and fisher are sensitive to what Adger might refer to as adverse effects. But these vulnerabilities are not coextensive, and an effort to ameliorate one form may not ameliorate the other. The literature on maladaptation is again instructive. Eriksen et al. (2021, p. 5) review a range of similar case studies where adaptation efforts, designed to mitigate certain vulnerabilities, create or aggravate other vulnerabilities. Magnan et al. (2016) describe efforts to strengthen coastal infrastructure resulting in populations being incentivized to stay in high-risk areas, thereby increasing their vulnerability to changing coastal conditions. Even as systemic resilience is buttressed, risk of harm to individuals has increased. What constitutes an adverse effect varies markedly between the susceptibility to harm and system resilience. While there might be a superficial connection between these conceptions of vulnerability, these two faces of vulnerability, they rely on different normative frameworks—harm and resilience. Where harm relies on well-being or a related normative standard (recall the Wisner et al. (2004) reference to “ill-being”), there is no such standard in the case of resilience. Yet both faces of vulnerability need to be addressed.
4 VULNERABILITY AND RISK
Yet, appeals to risk are not without contention. In the social science literature, “risk” is described by Brown et al. (2017) as “one of the most theorized terms in the social sciences” (p497; see also Beck, 1992, 2009; Breakwell, 2010). Interpretations of risk and understanding how we should apply risk analysis in climate adaptation vary markedly (Kunreuther et al., 2013; Schipper & Pelling, 2006; Scholze et al., 2006; Simpson et al., 2021; Wisner et al., 2004). Accordingly, recent IPCC reports take a very broad view of both risk and vulnerability. Risk is there defined as “The potential for adverse consequences for human or ecological systems, recognizing the diversity of values and objectives associated with such systems” (IPCC, 2022, p. AII-38). Notice, here, the close tie between risk and systems. Perhaps, as a consequence of the importance of risk in the climate adaptation literature, we see a tendency in the IPCC to rely on vulnerability as system resilience. Yet, there is nothing in the concept of risk that necessitates this focus on systems rather than, say, individual well-being (such appeals to risk are commonplace: e.g., individuals might wonder whether a particular course of action constitutes a risk to their health). And, as noted above, the IPCC's WG2 AR6 relies on a conjoined definition, one that appeals to both susceptibility to harm and system responsiveness. But in the climate adaptation literature there is an association of risk with systemic approaches to adaptation, and so the risk-framing of vulnerability in climate adaptation contexts has a strong tendency to support a system-based approach to vulnerability. Such a framing presses policy responses away from the forms of susceptibility to harm we see expressed in social and relational concerns, feminist accounts of vulnerability, and the discussions of “relative disadvantage” so central to justice.Vulnerability has often been described as the “capacity to be wounded”. It is a measure of the susceptibility to harm in a system in response to a stimulus or stimuli. In the case of climate change, the stimulus or stimuli are climate-related risks, and the system can range from an individual or household unit to the nation-state. Vulnerability research seeks to identify who and what are at risk to climate change and why… (Ford et al., 2010, p. 376, citing Smit & Wandel, 2006, emphasis mine; see also Ford et al., 2018).
Of course, as IPCC reports endeavor to reflect the full range of literature on climate change, we should expect appeals to vulnerability to reflect the diversity of uses across that literature. There is a clear concern over well-being and harm in line with the interpretation of vulnerability as susceptibility to harm. Integrating that literature might mitigate one concern, anticipated by Tschakert and Tuana (2013), that an excessive focus on systemic concerns might render injustices less apparent. However, to the extent that vulnerability is shaped by a risk framework, accounts of vulnerability will lean toward system resilience and, accordingly, be less able to address potential injustices in our adaptation strategies. Relying on risk to guide our adaptation strategies would be, therefore, misguided. Risk does not clearly have the resources to distinguish between the two faces of vulnerability, and so efforts to reduce concerns about vulnerability to concerns about risk will occlude just the normative distinction that makes those two faces of vulnerability so important.
5 DISSOCIATION: MAKING THE TWO FACES APPARENT
I have argued that there are significant concerns with relying exclusively on the system resilience face of vulnerability, but also that the resilience face is vital to understand the vulnerability of systems. And we have seen the importance of the susceptibility to harm face of vulnerability, but also some of the complications associated with characterizing the relevant harms. In this section, I will use the example of dissociation to make apparent the importance of both faces of vulnerability in the context of a problem central to climate change adaptation. Further, we will see that at least in this context there is a common concern, the separation of people from one another or the systems that both mitigate susceptibility to harm and provide for resilience. Dissociation, I claim, provides an example demonstrating the different pressures of our two faces, and the need to address both.
We should understand dissociation as the loss of connection with one's environment. Dissociation, whether between people and the systems on which they depend or between various systems (say, ecological systems and economic systems), generates vulnerabilities. This disconnect generates severe difficulties not only in the obvious sense that under such conditions it is harder to find food, water, and shelter, but in the more subtle yet no less important sense that one is unable to recognize what choices and options are available (Shockley, 2018). One paradigmatic way that vulnerabilities of populations are increased is through displacement, typically forced migration. While the challenges of migration are nearly as old as history itself, and the relationship between migration and climate change is complex (Cattaneo et al., 2019; Entwisle et al., 2020; Mach & Siders, 2021), the stresses of forced migration are increasingly apparent as we witness the challenges of climate change, population pressures, and the host of related concerns endemic to the Anthropocene (Kaczan & Orgill-Meyer, 2020; McLeman & Smit, 2006).
The social and ecological systems into which individuals move, under conditions of climate migration, will tend to be unfamiliar. Movement tends to break or strain connections between people and place, compromising the resilience of systems under stress and making those less connected to their surroundings (Tschakert et al., 2017). As social and ecological systems are put under pressure, changes to human populations within those systems, both increases and decreases, risk their further destabilization. Adaptation strategies face the challenge of balancing social and ecological systems in the face of population fluctuation. This intuitive disconnect constitutes an expression of Naylor et al.'s (2020) understanding of vulnerability in terms of the sensitivity to the interaction of systems. Further, while migration has the potential for great benefit, it also risks exacerbating power inequalities and making individuals susceptible to a range of harms (Tschakert & Neef, 2022). A similar effect is seen when what had been familiar is no longer so. As ecological systems shift we should expect to find similar problems faced by those dependent on shifting ecological systems as we find faced by those who have undergone migration (Dobrowski et al., 2021; Etana et al., 2020; see also Milner-Gulland, 2012). Dissociation in the context of climate change expresses both faces of vulnerability. Dissociated individuals have an increased susceptibility to harm. But there is also a concern with system resilience. The vulnerability faced by dissociated individuals is interdependent with the vulnerability of the system.
6 CONCLUSION
While vulnerability is expressed in many different ways, there are two general frameworks, two faces of vulnerability: frameworks that conceptualize vulnerability as susceptibility to harm, and frameworks that conceptualize vulnerability in terms of the resilience of systems. Vulnerability as susceptibility to harm presumes that vulnerability challenges well-being. The basis for the resilience of systems framework is its adaptive capacity—tied to maintaining its condition. These different frameworks may well lead us to advise different responses to climate change. Addressing the potential harms faced by the fisher may lead to different policy strategies than addressing the resilience of the fishery. As I have argued, the resilience of systems cannot account for all appeals to vulnerability any more than can the susceptibility of harm interpretation. Policy initiatives will not always promote both adaptive capacity—resilience—and well-being (Kehler & Birchall, 2021).
Yet even if we cannot reduce all appeals to vulnerability to a single account, it would be advantageous to find common ground, for at least a useful range of particular cases, that would encompass both system resilience and susceptibility to harm. We can see such a commonality in the dissociation of people from place. Both individuals and systems are vulnerable when their interconnections are compromised. Individuals are typically subject to harm through their relations to other individuals or systems. Systems are typically subject to failures of resilience as a matter of their response to, or relation with, other systems or stimuli. Just as the critique of vulnerability through feminist considerations of autonomy pointed to the normative importance of relational vulnerability in the susceptibility to harm sense of vulnerability, developments in complex adaptive systems point to the importance of the relation between systems for understanding at least an important set of vulnerabilities. Common ground across both forms of vulnerability is found in the sensitivity of both individuals and systems to relational pressures. There is a lesson here for further adaptation research. This interdependence between harm and resilience presents the possibility of a common ground for adaptation strategies, namely, the developing or maintaining of connections required both for system resilience and for mitigating susceptibility to harm.
The two faces of vulnerability are not completely interchangeable. But neither are the two entirely incommensurable. Focusing on the relational pressures that adversely affect both individual and system may provide a common ground, particularly in cases of dissociation, as we develop adaptation strategies for a climate-changed world. We might develop adaptation strategies that unify concerns about, say, vulnerable ecosystems and vulnerable populations living in those ecosystems. For example, policies may support both vulnerable alpine landscapes and vulnerable populations living on those landscapes by developing connections of people to place. Or returning to an earlier example, perhaps our focus for adaptation should be less on the fisher, forced to move to unfamiliar fisheries, or the fishery, as it changes over time and becomes decreasingly familiar to those who fish it, but on the connections between fisher and fishery. Perhaps such a focus on connection rather than on the vulnerabilities of fisher or fishery in isolation provides a constructive means of mitigating the risks of maladaptation. The hope for resolution across these two faces of vulnerability, and for reducing the prospects of maladaptation, may lie in mitigating the effects of disconnection, whether dissociation or otherwise, generated by climate change. Whether these disconnections are between systems or between individuals and the systems on which they depend, insofar as adaptation efforts are designed to resolve vulnerabilities, they should be designed with an eye to mitigating disconnection.
AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS
Kenneth Shockley: Conceptualization (lead).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Some of this material was presented to audiences at the Center for Values and Social Policy at the University of Colorado, the Twelfth Congress of the International Development Ethics Association, and the XXIV International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology. The author wishes to thank zaudiences at these events for their constructive feedback.
FUNDING INFORMATION
No external funding was used for this research.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST STATEMENT
The author declares no conflicts of interest.
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DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.
