Measuring Social Vulnerability to Climate Change at the Coast: Embracing Complexity and Context for More Accurate and Equitable Analysis

Social vulnerability indices are often used to quantify differential vulnerability to the impacts of climate change within coastal communities. In this review, we examine how “tried and tested” methodologies for analysing social vulnerability to climate hazards at the coast are being challenged by a new wave of indices that offer more nuanced conclusions about who is vulnerable, how, and why. Instead of producing high-level, generalised, and static conclusions about vulnerability, this new wave of indices engages more deeply with the interlinked socioeconomic, cultural, political, and economic specificities of place, as well as the multi-scalar and temporal dynamics, incongruities, and inconsistencies that are inherent to peoples’ lived, felt experiences of social vulnerability. By integrating these complex observations into an output that is still readily accessible to decision- and policy-makers, the new wave of indices supports the pursuit of more tailored, context-appropriate, and equitable climate adaptation. We suggest one way that these more nuanced forms of vulnerability analyses might be operationalised, by reflecting on an experimental research project that uses personas or fictional characters to examine social vulnerability to climate change in coastal Aotearoa New Zealand.