What is vulnerability? What are the different types of vulnerable groups? How does such classification help policymakers to develop poverty eradication policies? Explain with example.
Answers
Explanation:
The characteristics determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes which increase the susceptibility of an individual, a community, assets or systems to the impacts of hazards.
Vulnerability is the human dimension of disasters and is the result of the range of economic, social, cultural, institutional, political and psychological factors that shape people’s lives and the environment that they live in (Twigg, 2004).
Vulnerability can be a challenging concept to understand because it tends to mean different things to different people and because it is often described using a variety of terms including ‘predisposition’, ‘fragility’, ‘weakness’, ‘deficiency’ or ‘lack of capacity’.
Some definitions of vulnerability have included exposure in addition to susceptibility to harm. However, it is now understood that exposure is separate to the ‘susceptibility’ element of vulnerability since it is possible to be exposed, whilst at the same time not susceptible to natural hazards.
Despite some divergence over the meaning of vulnerability, most experts agree that understanding vulnerability requires more than analysing the direct impacts of a hazard. Vulnerability also concerns the wider environmental and social conditions that limit people and communities to cope with the impact of hazard (Birkmann, 2006).