Home / Summaries / Class notes - Rural Households and Livelihood Strategies / change-system-climate

SDC: Climate change and vulnerability

4 important questions on SDC: Climate change and vulnerability

What is climate change?

Any change that causes adjustments to a climate system, BUT climate change in daily usage points at changes in climate systems caused by humans. Climate change has always been a proces. Climate change is caused by humans. Climate change is often used as if it is interchangeable with global warming, but it entails more than global warming: changes in rainfall patterns, storms, droughts, etc.

What is the ordinary definition of vulnerability?

The capacity to be wounded, the degree to which a system is likely to experience harm due to exposure to a hazard. If something happens to a particular system, than how vulnerable is this system, how harmed would it be?
Factors: external shocks, and stress to which an individual or household is subject
Internal defencelessness, lack of means to cope without damaging loss

What is social resilience?

The ability of groups or communities to cope with external stresses and disturbances as a result of social, political and environmental change

What are 4 crucial elements of neoliberalism?

Commodification
Competition
Economic and methodological reductionism: you reduce reality to a particular element, this element you start researching about. Look at the small things all the time.
Deregulation > regulation --> less and less government involvement. Based on the idea of an economists. Deregulation has been taken over again by reregulation. Governments are becoming institutions.