Vulnerability Assessment Methods

In the development community, vulnerability has become an important concept used to guide the design, evaluation, and targeting of programs. As the concept has matured, practitioners have given greater emphasis to the multidimensionality of vulnerability, working with a variety of measures to capture its complexity. In this brief, we use the broad and established definition of vulnerability in sustainability science as “the degree to which a system, subsystem, or system component is likely to experience harm due to exposure to a hazard, either a perturbation or stress/stressor” (Turner et al., 2003, p. 74). This brief reviews the different methods of assessing vulnerability within the sector of economic strengthening.