Vulnerability Assessment Paper

Another limitation of existing vulnerability assessments is that vulnerability quantification methods are not necessarily developed in a way that mirrors the theoretical foundations behind the framework, such as the risk/hazard theory, political economy, and political ecology. These theories examine how natural hazards impacts in a community are determined by everyday patterns of social interaction, social organization and unequal access to resources (Warf 1997; Eakin and Luers 2006; Sheppard 2011), and often drive indicator development in frameworks such as the SoVI, VSD, or SVI (Cutter, Boruff, and Shirley 2003; Hahn, Riederer, and Foster 2009; Tate 2012; Vincent 2004; Flanagan et al. 2011; Polsky, Neff, and Yarnal 2007). Several studies often employ OLS as a preliminary tool for determining …show more content…
These indexes also utilize classical statistical methods like principal component analysis or regression modeling to measure total community vulnerability, as well as the influence of certain physical and social factors on vulnerability at various jurisdictional and socio-political levels (Birkmann 2007; Cutter, Boruff, and Shirley 2003; Wood, Burton, and Cutter 2010). However, these methods neglect spatial effects or interactions occurring between indicators occurring at different scales. Society is segregated and hierarchical, making scale a crucial consideration for accounting for interactions between multiscalar variables (Cozzens and Gieryn 1990; Giddens 1984; Schelling 1971; Subramanian, Duncan, and Jones 2001). Scale and spatial processes can inhibit the reliability of certain analytical types and physical hazard models devised for specific scales, resulting in biased conclusions based on the way areal units or scale of analysis are defined (Arbia and Petrarca 2011; Burt, Barber, and Rigby