Challenged by vulnerabilities

Communities worldwide are experiencing increasingly severe impacts of flood, drought, rising atmospheric temperature and sea levels, compounded by threats of war, food scarcity, epidemics, and political upheaval, to name but a few. Vulnerability is a core notion in research and discourses of natural hazards, disaster risk, climate change adaptation, sustainability and environmental justice. Its understanding is pivotal to assess, reduce, anticipate, and adapt to adverse consequences of risks to socio-political, socio-economic and social-ecological systems. However vulnerability, both in its definition, semantics and experience, remains a blurred, often contested concept, and its discontinuous application across a multitude of fields has resulted in information silos and a prevailing lack of ontological clarity, which hinders the inter- and transdisciplinary research into risk communication and reduction. This paper contributes to the discussions on vulnerability by exposing, through an ontological and critical lens, a series of challenges focussing specifically on application to climate change, disaster risk and, more broadly, social-ecological systems research. These challenges encompass foundational, “wicked,” and delicate topics, more specifically: (i) intrinsic and extrinsic vulnerabilities, (ii) multi-dimensional manifestations of vulnerability and its complex and dynamic, spatio-temporal aspects, and (iii) the relationship between vulnerability and resilience. In the concluding remarks, we summarise the most salient issues in the form of preliminary suggestions organised in a checklist to assist the tasks of defining, representing, and evaluating climate change and disaster risk vulnerability concept.