Las campañas institucionales en salud

Vulnerability is a concept that needs to be carefully examined to understand its specific meaning in a particular context. There are a number of definitions and applications of this term in a variety of disciplines including engineering, economics, environment, development studies, health, disaster

management, and climate science (Kates, 1985; Liverman, 1990; Bohle, et al., 1994; Cutter, 1996; Lewis, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004; Adger, 2006). In much of climate change literature, vulnerability is considered to be a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity (McCarthy et al., 2001). This interpretation draws on the hazard literature’s focus on the extent to which people, infrastructures, and biophysical systems are exposed to climate change and variability and the degree to which they can cope with its effects (O’Brien et al., 2004). Here, greater attention is on the futuristic quantification of vulnerability as an aggregate of adaptation and adaptive capacity in response to climatic hazards (Adger and Kelly, 1999). Seen from this perspective, the most vulnerable are considered to be those with low adaptive capacity living in the most precarious physical environment or in environments predicted to undergo dramatic changes as a result of climate change (Liverman, 2001). A critique of the hazard approach is that the social nature of communities is not recognized and it offers little explanation as to why certain people live in precarious areas in the first place or why adaptive capacity is unevenly distributed among equally exposed populations.

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In contrast to the hazards approach, a number of scholars argue that vulnerability is socially and politically constructed. It is simultaneously determined by the political and socio-economic structures that engender hazards (Wisner and Luce, 1993; Blaikie et al., 1994; Pelling, 1999; Wisner et al., 2004), the proximity of individuals or groups to the source of hazards (Cutter, 1996) and their capacity to respond it (Wisner et al., 2004). This approach incorporates the place-based interactions between biophysical vulnerability (exposure) and political ecology in an overall determination of differential social burdens of hazards and how this relationship changes over time and across space (Cutter et al., 2009). Rather than being defined by a future climate change scenario and anticipated adaptation, vulnerability is seen as an inherent inability of individuals or communities to cope with external pressure due to a chain of causes and

multiple processes occurring at different scales including global, national, and local scales (Blaikie et al., 1994; O’Brien et al., 2004). The United Nations Development Program (UNDP), for example, linked vulnerability to a combination of factors, including awareness of hazards, the conditions of human

settlement and infrastructure, public policy and administration, wealth of a given society and an organised ability in all fields of disaster and risk management (UNDP, 2004). Adger and Kelly (1999) refer to this second interpretation of vulnerability as the ‘starting point’ analysis and they assume that addressing present-day vulnerabilities will reduce vulnerability under future climate conditions. This perspective makes explicit human agency and also draws attention to the social, political and economic pressures that constrain individual capacity to avoid risks in advance and recover from crises when they occur (Adger, 2006).

Watts and Bohle (1993) argue that central to an individual adaptive capacity is the totality of their rights and their social entitlements to basic resources such as information, housing, health care, social welfare and technological support from the state, civil society and the international community. However,

entitlements to these resources are restricted or denied for many reasons including gender, race, class or economic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political preference (Barnett, 2010). Reduced adaptive capacity to deal with climate in other words occurs where people live in precarious conditions and are

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deprived of their rights to basic resources. For example, poor people of colour in New Orleans suffered disproportionately from the impact of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina because of their physical proximity to the source of hazard as well as their pre-existing conditions of poverty and lack of human rights

attainment (Mutter and Barnard, 2010; Smith 2006).

According to Barnett (2010), improvement in human rights conditions will not only help to reduce vulnerability but may translate into higher adaptive capacity. Take for instance an occasion where the livelihoods of farming communities fail due to climate change or market risk. Such populations will have few, if any, options to sustain their livelihoods (Adger, 1999). However, if the state guarantees the enjoyment of human rights such as social security including social insurance (ICESCR Article 9) and liberty of movement (ICCPR, Article 12, 1976), it can assist the communities to access other alternative strategies to sustain their livelihoods and maintain their communities (Barnett, 2010). Human rights can therefore be considered a powerful entitlement tool that allows people (as right-holders) to call on diverse resources, particularly from the State (as duty-bearers), to sustain their livelihoods in both normal and disaster times. It is therefore a tool that is central to building human capabilities and resilience against environmental and climatic risks (Sen, 1981; Drèze and Sen, 1990).

In this paper, we draw upon the concept of human rights (in particular, right to adequate housing) as an analytical lens to understand some of the socially constructed causes of high vulnerability and low

adaptive capacity to flooding in urban poor communities. We nest this human rights-based approach (HRBA) within a hybrid political ecology framework to provide a holistic understanding of the historical, social, economic, political and place-based factors that engender vulnerability to climate-related hazards (Figure 3.1). The key objective of applying a human rights-based approach to vulnerability is to provide States with a reference framework for identifying and addressing the adaptation needs of vulnerable groups in slum areas. Noting that a human rights-based approach can open up legal and political avenues to address existing inequalities as well as ensure that norms of fairness, accountability and non-discrimination are incorporated into national disaster-risk reduction and climate change policies.

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Figure 3.1: Hybrid of rights-based and political ecology vulnerability framework

(Adapted from: Barnett 2010; Blaikie et al., 1994; Cutter, 2006; Turner et al., 2003; Wisner et al., 2004)