Purpose
There are many ways to assess your community’s vulnerabilities and risks to current and future changes. In this activity, you will determine the depth, breadth, and approach of the vulnerability and risk assessment process. Depending on the scope of your project (see Step 1) you may work with your core team and decide to focus on specific sectors or specific hazards.
Why?
Depending on your specific project or need, the scope of your vulnerability assessment and its importance to a given project’s success will vary. Scenario planning exercises will help you to explore and understand, at a general level, the potential shocks, stressors, and cascading impacts that your community could experience. Yet, more detailed planning efforts (e.g., pre-disaster planning, local hazard mitigation planning, or climate adaptation planning) may require a deeper analysis like a Vulnerability Assessment and/or a Risk Assessment. In addition, projects focused on specific types of infrastructure or other technology may require a more technical approach due to the complexity of the systems in question. Communicating clearly about how, why, and for what purposes vulnerability assessments are being conducted can help to ensure more effective community buy-in and an effective translation into action.
When?
This activity should be conducted prior to developing resilience strategies and be adjusted as necessary as this process progresses. Depending on the size and scope of your need, it can be completed in the timeframe of a few weeks to a few months.
Tips
- It is important to communicate the rationale and findings of your work to the broader community effectively. Deciding on a clear definition of vulnerability and the concepts that define it is important both for conducting the analysis itself as well as ensuring its results are understandable.
- Customize your vulnerability assessment to meet your needs. This can be done by sector (e.g., transportation infrastructure) or by hazard (e.g., wildfire, drought, etc.). Specific types of infrastructure or other technology may require a more technical approach due to the complexity of the systems in question. Depending on the specific sectors important to your community, you may also choose a more focused approach that highlights specific key livelihoods, populations, social equity concerns, or infrastructure systems. Choose an approach that works best for your community.
- Consider the intersectionalities of shocks and stressors in your community. Many of the things we care about are connected to other things we care about. Likewise, many types of hazards can have secondary effects that lead to other hazard occurrences or amplify background stressors over the long term. For example, wildfires can threaten lives and destroy homes in the immediate term, but also lead to increased erosion in burn areas and increase flood risks. The 2020 Colorado Resilience Framework has the concept of “One Thing Leads to Another…” to highlight how different shocks and stressors can add up over time to create new, more complex challenges.
How does my community do this?
- Contact the CRO. The Colorado Resiliency Office supports Colorado communities to understand and define their vulnerabilities and risks to current and future shocks and stressors through a variety of scenario planning exercises. If you would like assistance in your scenario planning work, be sure to connect with your DOLA regional manager.
- Define the scope for understanding and defining your community’s shocks and stressors. Scenario planning exercises may help you explore and understand, at a general level, the potential shocks, stressors, and cascading impacts that your community could experience. Yet, more detailed planning efforts (e.g., pre-disaster planning or climate adaptation planning) may require a deeper analysis like a Vulnerability Assessment and/or a Risk Assessment (for more information, reference the Climate Ready Communities Guide to Building Climate Resilience (pages 55-82). The CRO has created four templates to support your work in the workbook: 1) a shocks and stressors template, 2) assess vulnerability template, 3) assess risk template, and 4) risk matrix template. It is here that you set boundaries on the specific project - or expand on previous work - and identify what you want to achieve in the process. A few questions to consider:
- What scale are you examining? The whole region, the town, an industry within the town?
- What range of hazards will you consider in-depth?
- Will you be examining all community assets (e.g., public health), or focusing on a specific subset?
- Choose your method for understanding and defining your community’s shocks and stressors. Choose an approach that both ensures trust within your community and is feasible given project resources. If possible, it is best to utilize multiple methods for completing your vulnerability assessment. Methods include scenario planning exercises at a general level. Or, you can do this at a deeper level by completing an in-depth vulnerability and risk assessment (for more information, reference the Climate Ready Communities Guide to Building Climate Resilience Step 3 (pages 55-82). Commonly used methods include indicators-based analyses, like geospatial analysis, economic analyses, and census data socio-demographic profiles. These provide general descriptors of a location and the people and systems within it. Alternatively, qualitative, social science-based approaches can capture local network characteristics, tipping points, and other complexities - such as how local businesses are affected by nearby wildfires when they rely upon tourism.
Image Description: Flow chart depicting the impacts of drought. To the left is a box with drought that connects to three different flow paths. At the top it shows Drought leads to Dry Forests and Prairie, which leads to Wildfire, which leads to Bare Slopes, which connects into Flash Floods. The second flow path shows Groundwater Withdrawals, which leads to Subsidence, which leads to Compacted Soils and again ends in Flash Floods. The third flow path is Economic Hardship, which all paths ultimately lead to. Chart also shows that Wildfire is compounded by Hot Weather and Flash Floods and Flood Damage are compounded by Heavy Rains.
Community Call Out: Cortez, CO
In 2018 the City of Cortez worked with program coordinators at the Western Water Assessment to hold a multi-day workshop on assessing community vulnerabilities and adaptation options. Bringing together city staff, members of the planning and city councils, and scientists from the Western Water Assessment, it focused on observed historical and future climate conditions, risk perceptions at the local level, and scenario development in the event of critical threats, such as a repeat of recent extreme droughts. It identified many specific local chains of events and consequences for several specific risk factors, allowing planners to play out how they can respond at different stages of a risk process. As detailed in their workshop report, this process allowed them to both engage with broad drivers of vulnerability and to ground adaptation planning options in a knowledge base that reached across the city’s numerous municipal departments and governmental agencies.