Vulnerability to climate change and its measurement: A survey

Aggravating the intensity and frequency of hazardous events and causing more threats to human lives, climate change has become a foremost environmental issue. With the emphasis of IPCC on the scientific understanding of vulnerability to climate change, the measurement of vulnerability is important not only to knowing to what extent an area is vulnerable to climate change, but also to the government of policy formulation in order to mitigate the extent of vulnerability. Till date, different methods have been developed using both econometric and index based approaches to measure vulnerability to climate change. This paper summarizes different approaches to measure vulnerability to climate change and the data related issues of these methods. The paper also presents the nexus between different methods and their applicability based on the available socioeconomic environment and the type of data concerned. The discussion on the use of different available methods by the later researchers in the succeeding section further enlarges the scope of use of these methods. Finally, we wind up the paper with some possible suggestions on the methods used to assess vulnerability to climate change for the later scholars.