This chapter deals with the conceptualization, identi fi cation and assessment of the vulnerability of different social groups to water related hazards in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta. The Mekong Delta is globally seen as one of the key hotspots of climate change related risks due to its exposure to fl oods, salinization and potential sea level rise. In order to underline the multifaceted nature of vulnerability to natural hazards and climate change the paper outlines vulnerability pro fi les of different households and socio-economic groups in selected hazard prone areas, notably in rural communities exposed to high fl oods, coastal communities exposed to saline intrusion and urban communities exposed to urban and tidal fl ooding. The different locations selected for the assessment of vulnerability allow comparing how different local context situations and hazard phenomena might in fl uence speci fi c coping and adaptation strategies. The socio-economic transformation processes and policy reforms that have affected all three locations are examined in terms of their in fl uence on vulnerability and capacities. The chapter provides a contribution to a further enhancement of methods, data bases and quality criteria for moving from an impact oriented risk assessment to a forward-looking vulnerability assessment

The "Last-Mile Evacuation" research project develops a numerical last mile tsunami early warning and evacuation information system on the basis of detailed earth observation data and techniques as well as unsteady, hydraulic numerical modeling of small-scale flooding and inundation dynamics of the tsunami including evacuation simulations in the urban coastal hinterland for the city of Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia. It is well documented that Sumatra's third largest city with almost one million inhabitants is located directly on the coast and partially sited beneath the sea level, and thus, is located in a zone of extreme risk due to severe earthquakes and potential triggered tsunamis. "Last-Mile" takes the inundation dynamics into account and additionally assesses the physical-technical susceptibility and the socioeconomic vulnerability of the population with the objective to mitigate human and material losses due to possible tsunamis. By means of discrete multi-agent techniques risk-based, time-and site-dependent forecasts of the evacuation behavior of the population and the flow of traffic in large parts of the road system in the urban coastal strip are simulated and concurrently linked with the other components.

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Coastal urban regions in low-lying areas in developing countries are often hotspots of climate change related risks and therefore the analysis of different characteristics of vulnerability, resilience and transformation is an important prerequisite for planning and decision making. Even though the concepts of resilience and transformation have been discussed for some time, they often remain still very abstract. Against this background the following paper aims to illustrate how different characteristics of vulnerability: susceptibility, exposure and adaptation from resilience to transformative change can be assessed in practice at the level of individual households and different city districts. The household survey was conducted in four low-income, at risk areas in the coastal megacity of Lagos. It reveals important differences between the case study locations in jj Corresponding author. This is an Open Access article published by World Scientific Publishing Company. It is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) License. Further distribution of this work is permitted, provided the original work is properly cited. J Extreme Events, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2016) terms of perceived capacities and actual responses of households to extreme events and creeping hazards. The analysis of behavioral changes undertaken after extreme events underscores that experience of loss and damage is an important stimulus for people to change their behavior. Moreover perception of actual and future risk management capacities and the performance of government institutions influences risk management regimes at the household level. It was found that at risk populations experienced both, inaction from government and individual households. This is a corrective to the majority literature that focuses on proactive local or government action. In fact, these examples of success may be quite rare and were not found in the four settlements studied in this research. The survey is part of a larger international project regarding the Transformation and Resilience of Urban Coasts (TRUC (2016). Transformation fo urban coasts Available at www.bel_truc.org) funded by the Belmont Forum and the DFG in particular in terms of the research in Lagos.

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Adaptation strategies to climate change need information about present and future climatic conditions. However, next to scenarios about the future climate, scenarios about future vulnerability are essential, since also changing societal conditions fundamentally determine adaptation needs. At the international and national level, first initiatives for developing vulnerability scenarios and so-called shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) have been undertaken. Most of these scenarios, however, do not provide sufficient information for local scenarios and local climate risk management. There is an urgent need to develop scenarios for vulnerability at the local scale in order to complement climate change scenarios. Heat stress is seen as a key challenge in cities in the context of climate change and further urban growth. Based on the research project ZURES (ZURES 2020 website), the paper presents a new method for human vulnerability scenarios to heat stress at the very local scale for growing medium-sized cities. In contrast to global models that outline future scenarios mostly with a country-level resolution, we show a new method on how to develop spatially specific scenario information for different districts within cities, starting from the planned urban development and expansion. The method provides a new opportunity to explore how different urban development strategies and housing policies influence future human exposure and vulnerability. Opportunities and constraints of the approach are revealed. Finally, we discuss how these scenarios can inform future urban development and risk management strategies and how these could complement more global or national approaches.

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