ABSTRACT
The vulnerability of drylands populations is subject to varying interpretations. How ‘vulnerability’ is perceived is important in influencing how the community or development organizations in the dryland regions respond to climate change (Füssel 2010). In this chapter, we use ‘community’ as defined by Smit and Wandel (2006) as an aggregation of households, interconnected in some way, and with a limited spatial extent, recognizing that interests and responses may vary between individuals in a community. The ability of the community to cope with adverse recurring events such as droughts as well as the risks posed by climate change forms an important part of adaptive capacity. Communities living in drylands are generally perceived as vulnerable, given the biophysical characteristics of the environment upon which their livelihoods depend (Adger et al. 2004), such as water scarcity. This conceptualization has led to the widely observed application of physical response measures in addressing vulnerability, and in defining coping and adaptation strategies (Turner 1994; Bohle 2001; Eriksen et al. 2005; O'Brien et al. 2007).
