Défense de thèse de doctorat en sciences géographiques "impacts of climate change"

Measuring social vulnerability to climate change-induced hazards in the Philippines

Jury

Pierre DEFOURNY (UCL), Grace CRUZ (Univ. of the Philippines, Manila), Vincent HALLET, président (UNamur), Marcel REMON (UNamur), Sabine HENRY, promoteur (UNamur)

Résumé

As the impacts of climate change are increasingly being felt by global society, 
we are now in a race against time to be prepared and proactive to 
mitigate its undesirable consequences on the population, particularly for those 
who are more vulnerable. One of the key tasks at hand is to better understand 
risk and its components of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability, which are 
crucial in mitigating loss and damage resulting from climate-related extremes.

This thesis seeks to develop and test an index for social vulnerability derived 
from raw census data for the entire Philippines at its most basic level 
of governance – the barangay. The rich data source allowed the formulation of 
a social vulnerability index (SVI) that is truly adapted to a particular 
country setting. Together with social vulnerability, the component of 
hazard exposure is an equally important aspect of risk and in the context of 
climate change-induced hazards, it also needs to be determined and delineated so 
that a proper assessment of these a priori measurable elements of risk can 
be evaluated together. The resulting SVI scores were validated against previous 
hazard events to determine if higher SVI scores have any relationship with the 
outcome of disasters, in particular coastal river flooding. Another 
investigation then looked at the possible influence of a recurrent hazard such 
as typhoons on the SVI scores of communities.

A comparison of SVI scores between two consecutive census years reveals 
pretty alarming trends in terms of trajectories of vulnerability at the 
barangay level. Rural barangays, which tend to dominate the very high 
vulnerability categories, have also remained consistently in the same high 
vulnerability states compared to their urban counterparts. At very local scales 
of analysis in the validation case studies, expected relationships between 
vulnerability states and loss and damage incurred during extreme flood events 
have resulted in findings that oppose conventional literature. Finally, although 
there is seemingly an initial inverse relationship between typhoon hazard 
exposure and social vulnerability, a geographic partitioning of the samples 
reveal inconclusive trends. 

La défense est publique

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