Affluence and vulnerability are often seen as opposite sides of a coin—with affluence generally understood as reducing forms of vulnerability through increased resilience and adaptive capacity. However, in the context of climate change and an increase in associated hazards and disasters, we suggest the need to re-examine this dynamic relationship—a complex association we define here as the Affluence–Vulnerability Interface (AVI). We review research in different national contexts to show how a more nuanced understanding of the AVI can (a) problematize the notion that increasing material affluence necessarily has a mitigating influence on social vulnerability, (b) extend our analysis of social vulnerability beyond low-income regions to include affluent contexts and (c) improve our understanding of how psychosocial characteristics influence people’s vulnerability. Finally, we briefly outline three methodological approaches that we believe will assist future engagement with the AVI.
Disaster response actors are facing new challenges, which encompass not only new and ever more complex threats but also the need to collaborate across organizational boundaries and even state borders. Depending on scale, these interactions have to work across governance setups, political and legal conditions, organizational cultures, as well as personal preferences and experiences that vary among actors, organizations, and countries. But which concrete measures are taken by crisis management actors at different scales to bridge these challenges and which of these could serve others as example to address comparable challenges in their contexts? This study made attempts to analyze whether certain solutions across organizations and states exist that facilitate effective interorganizational crisis management in the member states of the European Union (EU). It is based on selected expert interviews with representatives of different types of disaster response organizations (health services, police services, fire services, and other crisis management organizations) from seven EU member states (Germany,
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