GS3 PYQ 2019 (Mains Answer Writing): Vulnerability | UPSC Mains: Internal Security & Disaster Management PDF Download

Vulnerability is an essential element for defining disaster impacts and its threat to people. How and in what ways can vulnerability to disasters be characterized? Discuss different types of vulnerability with reference to disasters. (UPSC GS3 2019)

According to United Nation Office of Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), Vulnerability can be defined as the conditions determined by physical, social, economic and environmental factors or processes, which increase the susceptibility of an individual, a community, assets or systems to the impacts of hazards.
Vulnerability assessment needs to be based on a systematization and conceptualization of vulnerability describing the main linkages between the different components of risk. Only if the population and decision makers know where and how vulnerable the system is and which social–economic, physical, and environmental factors play a major role in it, adequate measures can be implemented to reduce vulnerabilities to disasters. It involves two approaches:

• Scientific Approach: It includes the research line of practical measurement approaches of vulnerability and disaster risk reduction.
• Policy Approach: It provides information about the spatial distributions of vulnerability to different natural hazards upon which the authorities need to take actions.

Different Types of Vulnerability

• Physical Vulnerability: The potential for physical impact on the physical environment – which can be expressed as elements-at-risk (EaR). The degree of loss to a given EaR or set of EaR resulting from the occurrence of a natural phenomenon of a given magnitude and expressed on a scale from 0 (no damage) to 1 (total damage)”.
  • For Example: A wooden house is sometimes less likely to collapse in an earthquake, but it may be more vulnerable in the event of a fire or a hurricane.
• Economic Vulnerability: The potential impacts of hazards on economic assets and processes (i.e. business interruption, secondary effects such as increased poverty and job loss) vulnerability of different economic sectors.
  • For Example: Families with low incomes often live in high-risk areas around cities, because they can’t afford to live in safer (and more expensive) places.
• Social Vulnerability: The potential impacts of events on groups such as the poor, single parent households, pregnant or lactating women, the handicapped, children, and elderly; consider public awareness of risk, ability of groups to self-cope with catastrophes, and status of institutional structures designed to help them cope.
  • For Example: Women and children are more vulnerable to disasters as compared to men.
• Environmental Vulnerability: The potential impacts of events on the environment (flora, fauna, ecosystems, biodiversity).
  • For Example: People living in the tropical areas are more vulnerable to tropical cyclones as compared to people living in temperate region.