Abstract

One of the key ingredients of industrial ecology is the concept of vulnerability, which includes an assessment of individual and social risks associated with anthropogenic environmental change, together with an appreciation of the robustness of people and societies to adapt to or accept such risks. This discussion of human vulnerability focuses on the world's most vulnerable populations: poor, urban, and rural inhabitants in the developing world. Environmental change can lead to significant societal disruption, especially among peoples less able to adapt.

Introduction

Much recent debate about global environmental change has tended to separate discussion of the natural and human sources of change from consideration of the impacts on human welfare posed by environmental variation and change. On the one hand, human activities such as fossil fuel consumption, land use, and industrial and agricultural production are widely recognized as major contributors to “environmental vulnerability,” driven primarily by rapid population growth, economic development, and technological change. On the other hand, many of these same activities, along with other aspects of natural resource management and human health and welfare, are themselves key factors in “human vulnerability” to environmental fluctuation and change, both now and in the future.

Unfortunately, separate consideration of these two aspects of vulnerability has led to poor integration of research and understanding, especially for policy applications. Decisions to modify human activities to reduce perturbations to the environment inevitably require tradeoffs between the costs and benefits of the activities, which in turn depend in part on the sensitivity of human welfare to different environmental variations.1 For example, developing countries are understandably reluctant to forego the immediate benefits of industrial and agricultural development — which among other things help to reduce vulnerability to present environmental variation—in order to help avert the longer term and less certain impacts of a changing climate.