Three core activities toward a relevant integrated vulnerability assessment: validate, visualize, and negotiate

Abstract

Journal of Risk ResearchThe future climate in the Nordic countries is expected to become "warmer, wetter, and wilder", and it is anticipated that this will cause more extreme weather events. Therefore, local authorities need to increase their ability to assess weather-related hazards such as floods, landslides, and storms, as well as people's sensitivity and capacity to cope with or adjust to such events. In this article, we present an integrated assessment of vulnerability to natural hazards, which incorporates both exposure and social vulnerability. An increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events may make local societies more exposed, but how these societies will change in the future may increase or decrease their vulnerability to extreme weather events. In our assessment, we screen places and rank them by their relative scores on exposure and vulnerability indices. We also design a web-based visualization toolViewExposed -which shows maps that reveal a considerable geographic variation in integrated vulnerability. ViewExposed makes it easy to identify the places with the highest integrated vulnerability, and it facilitates the understanding of the factors that make these places exposed and/or vulnerable. As empirical validation, we correlate the exposure indices with insurance claims due to natural damage. However, we also emphasize a dialogue with relevant stakeholders to ensure a participatory validation. Our top-down exposure and vulnerability assessment benefits from a participatory bottom-up assessment, which is crucial for such an assessment to be used to support decisions on where necessary adaptive and preventive measures to climate-change-related hazards should be carried out.

Do choropleth maps linked with parallel coordinates facilitate an understanding of multivariate spatial characteristics?

“…Strategies in assessing natural-hazard risks have recently evolved toward approaches that integrate the exposure to several hazards with various aspects of vulnerability (Cutter 1996;Cutter, Mitchell, and Scott 2000;Greiving, Fleischhauer, and Lückenkötter 2006;Tate, Cutter, and Berry 2010;Rød et al 2012;Rød, Opach, and Neset 2014). As a result, there is a demand for visualization tools that mitigation practitioners and decision-makers can use to make sense of multivariate data on hazard exposure and vulnerability (Tate et al 2011).…”

Climate vulnerability assessment methodology: Agriculture under climate change in the Nordic region

“…Rød et al 2012Rød et al , 2014. It was the users' interaction and dialogues concerning these perspectives that constituted the participatory process in Paper IV.…”

“…While I acknowledge that people's perceptions influence participatory approaches, it is beyond the scope of this thesis to analyse why participants 'perceive' agricultural vulnerability as they do, or how they make sense of vulnerability. Rød et al (2014) emphasized the importance of the participatory validation of data, i.e., when stakeholders interact with the data and their judgements of parameters and indices serve to validate the content. This is considered as important as traditional validation, for example, using historical data, since the result of participatory validation supports the assessment of the usability and policy relevance of the data.…”

“…Another visualization technique that could beneficially be included in a visual environment with multiple linked views is the Sankey diagram, a flow diagram in which the widths of the flows represent quantities (Alemasoom et al 2014). A map-based multiple view approach is feasible for visually representing vulnerability data (Opach and Rød 2013), and some examples of studies using such an approach are Rød et al (2014), Neuvonen et al (2015), and Carter et al (2016).…”

“…Rød et al (2014) noted that visualization, validation, and negotiation are three essential activities that vulnerability assessments must undertake. A geographic visualization approach can be argued to meets this demand, enabling a process by which scientific knowledge can be integrated with local expert judgement.…”