**Roshnie A. Doon**

Climate change threatens the physical and mental health of vulnerable communities and can have a significant impact on their livelihoods. Climate change can also deepen existing social and economic inequities and contribute to the erosion of coping skills and resilience. Transformative social and economic responses based on inclusion and dialogue with members of the community are needed in such an ever-changing global environment, including investment in innovative measures to strengthen community-based assets, and the fostering of collective agreements and partnerships between communities and governments.

The unpredictable nature of climate change events often presents vulnerable communities such as farmers, fisherfolk, and indigenous groups, amongst others, with challenges that threaten the economic stability of their households, communities, and even their domestic economies. This can be especially true if the country in question relies on tourism or agriculture as a primary source of revenue. For example, Akanbi et al. (2021), found that for Nigerian farmers engaged in low-technology-based food production such as rice farming, climate change poses a significant threat as it increases their vulnerability to food poverty. For this reason, Bedeke (2022) argues that farmers need to change their style of cropping to accommodate exposure to extreme conditions such as erratic rainfall, recurrent floods and droughts, elevated temperatures, and solar radiation. In such instances, Bedeke (2022) suggests that programs that facilitate such behavior changes can lead to the propagation of drought-tolerant plants and high-yield varieties of rice and other crops (Bedeke 2022). It is important to recognize that climate change, manifest as it is in multiple ways, impacts communities differently depending upon a range of multi-layered factors.

For example, along the coastal regions of Spain and the Mediterranean, climate change has played a significant role in the regional disparities in the vulnerability of fisheries and coastal tourism, leading various communities to become more exposed than others. Aragão et al. (2021) found that based on the sensitivity of fisheries to climate change and the ability to adapt to such changes, fisherfolk in the Mediterranean were more vulnerable than those in the Atlantic. While tourist resorts on the north-western Mediterranean coast of Egypt are particularly prone to shoreline and beach erosion, the degradation of infrastructure, and the devaluation of properties, reducing the revenues earned by the tourist industry (El-Masry et al. 2022).

Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa are heavily dependent on agriculture and fishing and women play an integral role in the processing and selling of the commodities produced. However, women have little access to land, to agricultural support services or to financial resources and consequently are more vulnerable to climate change impacts on food security. Anugwa et al. (2022) find that such

inequalities arise because of traditional socio-cultural roles, inequities in access to education, and the deprivations faced geographic locations such as coastal or rural communities. Apart from the gender dynamic of climate change, Awolala et al. (2021) find that even though depressed areas may have access to basic amenities, women (and their children) and elderly populations are often income-poor, lack the necessary services to ensure their wellbeing and have insufficient support from government institutions.

Extreme weather conditions, such as elevated temperatures and prolonged droughts in the case of Africa, impacts persons' capacity for food security in a negative manner while simultaneously exacerbating social inequality. These conditions impact the health of vulnerable communities as these extreme climate change events may lead to malnutrition, cholera, and the displacement of entire communities such as nomadic tribes who may lack access to water and consequently have poor levels of sanitation and hygiene (Charnley et al. 2022). Indeed, climate change is increasingly responsible for population displacement and the creation of refugee communities.

Tribal communities in Africa and India often earn their income from engaging in agricultural practices such as cropping and working on tea plantations, making them vulnerable to high rainfall, flooding, and landslides (Deb and Mukherjee 2022; Kaur et al. 2022). For this reason, these groups are slow to adapt and are more susceptible to the effects of climate change events. Even in economically advanced countries like Australia, human-induced climate change events such as bushfires are known to harm the health of remote communities that, because of their isolated location, have limited access to transport, health care services, infrastructure, and economic resources (Hall and Crosby 2020).

International organizations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are tasked with designing and implementing climate change policies to address the impact that climate change has on vulnerable groups in society. However, Biesbroek et al. (2021) explain that the policy literature tends to focus more on the impact of climate change more widely, rather than on the needs of especially vulnerable groups, adaptation, or governance. In addition to focusing on the last three areas, there is a need to review how vulnerability impact assessments are undertaken by institutions around the world because vulnerability ranking determines climate change responses (Birkmann et al. 2022).

Notwithstanding these important areas of adaptation, mitigation, governance, and the design/effectiveness of climate change policy on vulnerable population, the aim of this book is to shed greater light on the experiences of various vulnerable populations within countries to the extreme changes to climate change. This is especially important as the perception of risk to vulnerable populations has increased dramatically as their healthcare, food, shelter, financial security and physiological needs are all put into jeopardy due to climate change events (either natural or

manmade) causing disproportionate imapcts on their lives and livelihoods (Akerlof et al. 2015; O'Brien and Wolf 2010).

This book provides a detailed discussion of how climate change events are linked to existing issues such as homelessness, maternal and child health, mental health, gender-based violence in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, farming, food insecurity, problems of gender equality, biological vector-borne diseases, temperature-related diseases, as well as ecological and climate anxiety in children. This book considers these and more pressing subject matters in relation to a wide variety of changes to the global climate, with discussions ranging from extreme heat, rising temperatures/precipitation, frequency of climate change disasters such as hurricanes, and reducing air quality, to the presence of droughts and extreme flooding. This collection of chapters is based on the perspectives of vulnerable communities not only from the Caribbean region, but from individual countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa, Dominica, Pakistan, and the United States.

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