H07 seminarsVulnerability -

Data and methods

Climate Risk Management Unit

Institute for Environment and Sustainability

17th May 2016

Vulnerability

to

Drought

Hugo Carrão, Gustavo Naumann

and Paulo Barbosa

Context

• Vulnerability to Drought

• DEWFORA (2011-2014, EU FP7 project)

• EUROCLIMA II (started in 2014, Administrative Arrangement DG DEVCO)

• Global Drought Observatory (started in 2015, Administrative Arrangement

DG ECHO)

• A framework for Drought Risk or Likelihood of Drought Impact

EUROCLIMA: Drought risk is not an absolute measure of actual economic loss or damage to human health or the environment, but a relative statistic suitable for ranking regions and prioritize actions to reinforce mitigation and adaptation plans.

IPCC, 2012: Summary for Policymakers

Risk Hazard Exposure Vulnerability

Likelihood of drought impact.

Probability of exceeding a drought event with a certain severity.

Propensity of individuals or communities to suffer adverse effects when impacted by a drought event.

Amount of population, assets or other valuable elements in regions where the probability of drought occurrence is not null.

Risk or Likelihood

of Drought Impact

• Quantitative statistics varying 0-1;• The legend breaks are statistical thresholds

and serve only for guidance – percentiles of respective geographic distribution.

EUROCLIMA II: the case study for Latin America

United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction

(UNISDR, 2004)

Vulnerability to Drought

• Regional unit-free statistic that varies between 0 (min) and 1 (max);

• The values are relative to the most vulnerable geographic region(s)

at a given moment: suitable for ranking and comparison;

• Can be updated in time: appropriate for showing progress in regional

drought mitigation and adaptation plans;

• Composite statistic of three factors, as similar to the Drought

Vulnerability Index (DVI) (Naumann et al., 2014):

• Social;

• Economic;

• Infrastructural.

Naumann, G., Barbosa, P., Garrote, L., Iglesias, A., and Vogt, J.,2014: Exploring drought vulnerability in Africa: an indicator based analysis to be used in early warning systems, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 18, 1591-1604.

Vulnerability to drought reflects the relative regional development, namely its economic capacity, human and civic resources, as well as physical infrastructures.

• World Bank, http://data.worldbank.org/products/wdi

• U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), http://www.eia.gov/

• Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home

• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), http://stats.oecd.org/

• Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), http://www.fao.org/nr/water/aquastat/main/index.stm

• World Resources Institute, http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/aqueduct

• Global Roads Open Access Data Set (gROADSv1), http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/groads-global-roads-open-access-v1

The emphasis in public data ensures that the final result can be tested, reproduced, and improved with new data by the scientific community and

stakeholders.

Data sources for

computing Factors

Proxy Indicators at Country Level

• Agriculture (% of GDP); World Bank

• Poverty headcount ratio at $1.25 a day (PPP) (% of total population); World Bank

• GDP per capita (current US$); World Bank• Energy Consumption per Capita (Million Btu per Person); U.S. EIA

• Rural population (% of total population); World Bank• Improved water source (% of rural population); World Bank• Refugee population (% of total population); World Bank

• Life expectancy at birth (years); World Bank• Population ages 15-64 (% of total population); World Bank• Literacy rate (% of people ages 15 and above); World Bank• Government Effectiveness; WGI• Disaster Prevention & Preparedness (US$/Year/capita); OECD

Proxy Indicators at Subnational Level

• Agricultural irrigated land (% of total agricultural land); FAO• % of retained renewable water; Aqueduct

• Road density (km of road per 100 sq. km of land area); gROADSv1

Social Factor: Level of well-being of individuals and communities

Economic Factor: Economic status of individuals,communities and nations

Infrastructural Factor: Infrastructures needed to support the production of goods and sustainability of livelihoods

How to convert indicators to a common unit and aggregate them to derive each factor of vulnerability?

Proxy Indicators for

computing Factors

Factors’ Computation

• Minimum Mapping Unit:

• Sub-national administrative regions;

• Masking sub-national administrative regions:

• >75% hyper-arid conditions;

• Normalization of indicators, as similar as for

the Human Development Index, HDI (UNDP):

• Aggregation of Indicators for each Factor?

• Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).

Univariate (e.g. Life expectancy)

Multivariate

Geographic Distribution of

Vulnerability to Drought

Performance evaluation?

Factors

Vulnerability

Performance Evaluation (1)

• Outputs are not directly observed but rather inferred – there is no reference for

accuracy assessment;

• Performed a sensitivity analysis with alternative composites based on different

weighting and aggregation schemes of factors, namely:

• (A) arithmetic, (G) geometric, or (P) product of factors

• (W) weighted (i.e. proportional to the # indicators) or (NW) non-weighted

• This sensitivity analysis is like an unsupervised task of inferring the best

clustering technique to describe a hidden structure from raw input data.

• Internal minimum variance criterion of unsupervised cluster stability, i.e. the

minimum distance to the regional median ranks, to evaluate the performance

of alternative composite statistics.

Performance Evaluation (2)

Concluding Remarks

• Empirical approach: composite accuracy depends on input data quality;

• Internal performance evaluation: no reference dataset for validation;

• All factors and indicators are equally weighted: expert knowledge can be used to

improve composite statistics;

• Vulnerability focus on agricultural drought: other specific DVIs can be developed

for other sectors of activity (e.g. energy production, river transportation).

Thank you for your attention!

More information:

http://edo.jrc.ec.europa.eu/scado/

hugo.carrao@jrc.ec.europa.euUyuni, Bolivia

Photo credit Carlos Cruz