The factors and processes identified by participants as shaping vulnerability to climate stress on Mota Lava are reflected in a ‘Nature of Vulnerability Diagram’
(NVD) (Figure 19). Figure 19 explains the structure of the NVD. The purpose of the NVD is to illustrate the structure of vulnerability to climate stress. Its function is to summarise and reflect the factors and processes that are reducing the size of the adaptive toolkit (discussed in this chapter and the next) and to make clear that most of the causes of vulnerability to climate stress: a) have little or nothing to do with climate, and b) stem from non-local processes.
The NVD reflects the way in which local people themselves discussed and represented their own constructions of vulnerability in storian. Vulnerability to climate stresses has direct causes, for example, changes in gardening practices (represented in Figure 19 by the blue circle). However, the factors contributing to changes in gardening practices are indirectly related to climate, for example, a general loss of traditional knowledge (represented in Figure 19 by the yellow circle). These contextual causes are shaped by distant processes such as development pathways.
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Figure 19 The Nature of Vulnerability Diagram (NVD) framework. The NVD represents the structure of vulnerability at the community scale. The concentric circles represent the decreasing specificity and distance of causal factors and processes to climate stress itself. The blue circle represents factors and processes directly contributing to community vulnerability that are specific to climate stresses. The yellow circle represents factors and processes indirectly shaping these direct contributors. Outside the circles are factors and processes driving vulnerability that are distant to the community and not within their immediate control. The current chapter is concerned mainly with indirect and distant factors and processes.
The structure of the NVD is broadly reflective of the structure of Wisner et al. ’s (2004) ‘Pressure and Release’ model (PAR)41, in-so-far-as the concentric circles reflect factors and processes influencing vulnerability at decreasing levels of specificity from a particular climate stress. The circles of the NVD progress from factors ‘most directly related to specific climate stresses’ in the innermost, to those ‘least directly related to climate stresses’ in the outermost. However, the major point of departure from the PAR conceptualisation is that the NVD does
41 Although the data ‘spoke for itself’ and the PAR was not originally used as a template for analysis.
Vulnerabilities Direct causes Indirect causes Distant causes
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not attempt or advocate any ‘chain of explanation’ for event-centred vulnerability. Wisner et al. (2004: 52) contend that:
… an explanation of disasters requires us to trace the connections that link the impact of a hazard on people with a series of social factors and processes that generate vulnerability.
The most distant factors and processes in the PAR are called ‘root causes’. I avoid this terminology, instead framing these simply as ‘distant causes’. ‘Root cause’
indicates a series of discrete, direct sources of vulnerability to particular climate events. This indicates discrete event-centred solutions. This is despite Wisner et al. ’s assertion that:
As we move up the chain of explanation from unsafe conditions to root causes, the linkages (and therefore the level of precision in disaster explanation) becomes less definite. In analysing the linkages between root causes, dynamic pressures and unsafe conditions it becomes increasingly difficult to have reliable evidence for causal connections, especially as we go further back in the chain of explanation (Wisner et al., 2004: 61).
Local framings in my research indicate that “disaster explanation” is seldom linear, and that searching for a linear explanation in analysis seldom makes sense through local eyes, or produces effective outcomes in practice. Based on local community perceptions of vulnerability to climate stress in my research, attempting a ‘chain of explanation’ is unlikely to have effective or sustainable vulnerability reducing outcomes, as the factors and processes shaping vulnerability to certain biophysical stressors are multiple and interlinked. As such, I reject the “chain of explanation” discourse underpinning the PAR. Each circle in the NVD indicates a complexly interwoven layer of factors and processes that create a context from which vulnerability arises rather than attempting to specify direct relationships between factors in different layers.
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As in the PAR, the NVD reflects that vulnerability – literally and non-literally – is a product of factors and processes operating both at a distance, and ‘close to home’. The concentric circles show the layers of vulnerability causality, indicating the ‘nested hierarchy’ (Smit and Wandel, 2006) of factors and processes generating a situation where people are vulnerable – and resilient – to climate stress. The distant causes contained in the NVD are largely external to the community in terms of space, power, time and ‘visibility’. Development processes at a provincial, national and international scale shape the community’s access to particular livelihood resources and opportunities, for example. These factors and processes are distant in terms of space and power. Some of these factors and processes are also distant, temporally. The land-use decisions of recent ancestors influence famine food production in the contemporary situation, for example. Climate change makes uncertain future environmental change a particularly pertinent aspect of temporal distance. So, many of the factors and processes shaping the community vulnerability context are distant – spatially, politically, temporally, and culturally – and therefore largely outside the direct sphere of influence of the community itself.
Figure 20 displays Mota Lava’s NVD. It displays a particular ‘event-centred’
manifestation of vulnerability – vulnerability to food insecurity following a tropical cyclone (discussed in Chapter Five). As is discussed in Chapter Five, cyclone-related food insecurity was, overwhelmingly, the most frequently discussed aspect of climate related vulnerability in Mota Lava. Cyclone Funa (January 2008) revealed this to be a significant problem. Many of the distant and indirect causes of food insecurity shape other cyclone-centred manifestations (such as insecure housing) as well as other climate stressor-centred manifestations (such as drought-related food insecurity). As stated by Lavell (2004: 82), “both disaster and everyday risk have similar origins”.
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centred insecure housing and drought-centred food insecurity are referred to throughout to enrich the discussion of distant causes42.
The direct causes of vulnerability contained in the blue circle are a loss of traditional vulnerability reduction tools. The specifics of these are discussed in Chapter Five. The yellow circle contains examples of the indirect social processes underpinning this reduction in the adaptive toolkit. These are priority concerns in the community regardless of climate stress as they underlie most other community problems. These are the focus of this chapter. Outside the circles are the distant causes of these local problems. These are socio-economic, cultural, historical, and political in nature, operating at national, regional and global scales. The community have little power to influence these processes. Together, these indirect and distant processes are breaking down the social apparatus that sustains an effective traditional adaptive toolbox, whilst at the same time limiting the availability and effectiveness of contemporary tools.
42 It is likely that in some community contexts it would be necesessary to develop discrete NVD’s for different aspects of vulenrability to a certain climate stressor, and/or for different climate stressors. However, in this case study, the degree of overlap between the factors and processes shaping different manifestations of vulnerability was such that this is unnesessary.
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Figure 10 Mota Lava’s NVD. This figure shows an NVD for Mota Lava. In this figure, the basic framework shown in Figure 14 above is populated with factors and processes specific to Mota Lava’s vulnerability to food insecurity in the context of tropical cyclones. Importantly, the arrows do not specify specific relationships between the factors and processes contained within each layer. Rather, each layer represents multiple and interacting factors and processes forming a context from which vulnerability to cyclones arises. The arrows are intended only to indicate the direction of influence – from non-local to local.
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