Generic and specific facets of vulnerability for analysing trade‐offs and synergies in natural resource management

Abstract

1. The concept of vulnerability as the combination of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity to a stressor is gaining traction outside of the climate realm, opening new avenues to address contemporary sustainability issues more holistically. Yet, critical notions that underpin vulnerability have yet to be integrated into its application to natural resource management and non-climatic stressors. In particular, the way generic and stressor-specific facets of vulnerability interact and can inform decision-makers about how interventions combine and/or trade-off remains unexplored.2. Here, we investigate the salience of the generic/specific framing in the context of Chilean artisanal fishing communities engaged in rights-based co-management and experiencing pressures from two stressors: poaching and market volatility.Specifically, we draw on market data combined with socio-economic surveys conducted with 446 members and leaders from 42 fisher unions to quantitatively investigate potential trade-offs and synergies between facets of vulnerability to poaching and markets.3. Generic adaptive capacity (i.e. flexibility, assets, learning, organization and agency) likely facilitated stressor-specific adaptive capacities to both stressors. High levels of specific adaptive capacity to one stressor neither increased exposure nor undermined specific adaptive capacity to the other stressor. However, adaptive capacity did not translate into exposure reduction as expected, suggesting that adaptation barriers may prevent fishers from mobilizing adaptive capacity into effective adaptive action. This study illustrates how breaking down vulnerability into generic and specificfacets can help us better anticipate important trade-offs and synergies in management interventions. More generally, it highlights the potential of the climate 574 | People and Nature THIAULT eT AL.

Economic, sociocultural and ecological dimensions of fishing capacity in NW Mediterranean fisheries

“…Our paper shows that fishers are not individuals acting under pure economical rational behaviour but social actors whose activity is embedded in social relations and the environment in a dynamic complex relationship of values, norms, policies, technology, economic motivations which are deployed both at sea and in land. To what we have to add, as happening in other fisheries communities of the world, the changes affecting the socio-economics and bio-physical factors interdependencies, which are not regardless to new market demands and conditions neither new governance plans at the rate of environmental changes (Thiault et al, 2019).…”

Harnessing the potential of vulnerability assessments for managing social-ecological systems

“…• Use local expert judgement, multicriteria decision techniques, and other approaches that are available to quantify the relative contribution of individual indicators when place-specific, empirical weights are not available (6-8). (Füssel 2007, Eakin and Bojórquez-Tapia 2008, Thiault et al 2019b • Vulnerability lacks clarity on the relative importance of each indicator.…”

“…For instance, in their global assessment of the vulnerability of agriculture and fisheries (the components), Blanchard et al (2017) and Thiault et al (2019a) used sector-specific exposure (projected changes in sectoral productivity) and sensitivity (dependency on each sector), but adopted a generic view of adaptive capacity because they considered that their indicator (level of economic development) enabled a country to mobilize resources and adjust any type of food production sector to the potential impacts of climate change. Alternatively, an assessment of one component to two (or more) stressors (O'Brien and Leichenko 2000, Leichenko and O'Brien 2002, Thiault et al 2019b) may require a parallel assessment where some domains and indicators are generic to all stressors while others are stressor-specific (Fig. 3e).…”

“…Common multiple-criteria decision analysis methods often provide an estimation of judgement consistency, and can be used to adjust scores during expert elicitation exercises aiming at estimating indicator weights (Eakin and Bojórquez-Tapia 2008, McClanahan et al 2008, Thiault et al 2018a). In addition, computational experiments such as Monte Carlo simulations help investigate the range of possible vulnerability outcomes by modeling vulnerability under various combinations of data sources, transformation, aggregation, and/or weightings methods, thus enabling to distinguish robust from less reliable modeling results (Thiault et al 2018a, 2019b, Bourgoin et al 2020.…”

“…However, SES are exposed and potentially vulnerable to a broad range of socioeconomic and biophysical stressors beyond climate and the subsequent environmental change (Bennett et al 2016). As a consequence, vulnerability has gained traction in other areas, with applications ranging from social vulnerability to management (Chen et al 2014, Chen and Lopez-Carr 2015, Tilley et al 2018, socioeconomic changes (O'Brien and Leichenko 2000, O'Brien et al 2004, Belliveau et al 2006, Thompson et al 2016, poaching (Thiault et al 2019b), fire (Aretano et al 2015), and other human uses of ecosystems (Jones and Cheung 2018, Thiault et al 2018a, Bourgoin et al 2020. However, such assessments tend to lack theoretical or empirical underpinnings, and are consequently undertaken without a good understanding of the determinants and processes affecting vulnerability in that particular context.…”