How vulnerable is the landscape when the typhoon comes? An emergy approach

In the context of climate change, extreme climatic events affect socio-economic systems by damaging natural and urban systems. Vulnerability to climate change can be quantified as the degree to which a system is susceptible to and unable to cope with adverse impacts of climate change. This paper proposes an emergy approach for assessing the vulnerability of a landscape system. The emergy value of "exposure" can be estimated as the total emergy of the extreme event acting upon an area; "sensitivity" is the amount of stored emergy that is likely to be affected; and the "adaptive capacity" is the system's ability to attract emergy inflow to recover and to adjust from the impacts. Emergy indices are also proposed to understand the extent of the damage caused by extreme events and the socioeconomic system's ability to cope with extreme events. The applicability of the proposed emergy approach for assessing vulnerability is discussed. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.