The surface of vulnerability: An analytical framework for examining environmental change

This paper introduces an analytical framework for evaluating the vulnerability of people and places to environmental and social forces. The framework represents the relative vulnerability of a variable of concern (e.g. such as agricultural yield) to a set of disturbing forces (e.g. climate change, market fluctuations) by a position on a three-dimensional analytical surface, where vulnerability is defined as a function of sensitivity, exposure, and the state relative to a threshold of damage. The surface is presented as a tool to help identify relative vulnerability in order to prioritize actions and assess the vulnerability implications of management and policy decisions.