GEOS2111 Chap.2 Frameworks for vulnerability and resilience
Frameworks for vulnerability and resilience
Week 2 is intellectual history with an immediate practical payoff. Explanations of why disasters happen have moved, over about two and a half thousand years, through three answers: God, then nature, then people and therefore politics.
The unit sums the shift up as divine will giving way to human agency, and each answer implies a different place to intervene, which is why organisations that disagree about disaster policy usually disagree because they are standing at different points on that line. Pre-Enlightenment thought largely read catastrophe as divine punishment.
A minority dissented early: among the pre-Socratics, Thales argued that disasters were caused by natural world processes, and classical writers including Plato and the geographer Strabo extended a naturalistic account. The Enlightenment turned that account into a method of description, theory, measurement and evidence.
By the early twentieth century the field had settled into an exclusively physical account treating hazards as functions of the four Earth systems with no role for people, and it failed on its own terms: as understanding of Earth system processes improved and spending on hard engineered risk management rose, disaster losses kept rising.
That anomaly forced the social turn, marked in the unit by a 1920 sociological study of a harbour explosion and by 1945 work on human adjustment to floods. What resulted is two paradigms that both remain in use. The hazards paradigm emphasises the physical environment and treats vulnerability as a linear negative outcome of exposure, measured risk and realised impact, leading to technocratic engineering solutions.
The alternative paradigm, grown out of 1970s research on famine, drought and food insecurity, treats vulnerability as a politicised social condition produced by lack of access and entitlement to resources.
The week then supplies the frameworks that carry the second view: the Pressure and Release progression of vulnerability with its root causes, dynamic pressures and unsafe conditions, the compact statement that risk is hazard times vulnerability, the triangle of vulnerability, the MOVE framework decomposing vulnerability into exposure, susceptibility and lack of resilience, and the adaptive cycle.
It closes on the physical scaffolding for the rest of the unit: four Earth systems and the endogenic and exogenic energy sources that drive them, under an international disaster risk reduction framework.
What this chapter covers
- 01
From divine will to human agency: how explanation of disaster has moved
- 02
The early twentieth century physical account, and the rising losses that refuted it
- 03
The hazards paradigm: physical environment, measured risk, engineered solutions
- 04
The alternative paradigm: access, entitlement, power and vulnerability as a social condition
- 05
The Pressure and Release model: root causes, dynamic pressures, unsafe conditions
- 06
Risk as hazard times vulnerability, and what that compression hides
- 07
The triangle of vulnerability, and the MOVE decomposition into exposure, susceptibility and lack of resilience
- 08
The adaptive cycle and panarchy: slow accumulation and fast release across scales
- 09
Whether vulnerability can be measured, and what indicators buy and cost
- 10
Four Earth systems, two energy engines, and where the international framework sits
Reading one cyclone through both paradigms, and deciding which one the funding should follow
- +1Run the hazards paradigm first, because it is not wrong. Look for physical differences in the agent and the site: the surge height each settlement received, elevation above the storm tide, whether a river mouth funnelled water, and what built protection existed. If one settlement genuinely took twice the water depth, that is part of the explanation and a levee is a real intervention.
- +1Then switch columns. Ask what was already true before the cyclone arrived: housing construction and tenure, whether households had transport and somewhere to go, whether the warning reached people in a language and format they acted on, how many residents could not leave work, and whether local institutions could organise an evacuation.
- +1Push one layer further, which is what the Pressure and Release model is for. Ask why the two settlements differed in those respects: settlement history, how land was allocated, and which of the two received investment. Those are dynamic pressures and root causes rather than unsafe conditions, and they are the layer an answer that stops at housing quality never reaches.
- +1Name what each framing makes visible and what it hides. The hazards paradigm makes the water depth visible and hides the tenure. The alternative paradigm makes the tenure visible and, if pushed too far, reduces the cyclone itself to a trigger, which the unit flags as its own characteristic blind spot.
- +1Adjudicate, in a stated order rather than by choosing a side. Engineering buys time and is fast and visible; on its own it reproduces the pattern, because the household that could not evacuate this time still cannot next time. The defensible position is that protection works while the dynamic pressures are addressed, and that recovery is successful only if the second settlement is measurably less exposed and less constrained than before, not merely better built.
Key terms
- Hazards paradigm
- The tradition that emphasises the physical environment and treats vulnerability as a linear negative outcome of exposure, measured risk and realised impact. Its characteristic intervention is technocratic, drawn from engineering and the physical sciences.
- Alternative paradigm
- The tradition that grew out of 1970s research on famine, drought and food insecurity and treats vulnerability as a contextualised, politicised social condition produced by lack of access and entitlement to the resources needed to sustain livelihoods.
- Root causes
- The society-wide, slowly changing conditions at the far end of the Pressure and Release model: limited access to power, structures and resources, and the ideologies and political and economic systems that distribute them.
- Dynamic pressures
- The processes that translate root causes into particular places and decades, such as rapid urbanisation, rapid population change, deforestation, debt repayment schedules, declining soil productivity and absent local institutions.
- Unsafe conditions
- The visible end of the Pressure and Release chain: dangerous locations, unprotected buildings and infrastructure, low incomes, livelihoods at risk and groups already exposed. These are what a photograph on the day shows.
- Entitlement
- A person or household's command over the resources needed to sustain life and livelihood. The concept comes from famine research and is the mechanism by which the alternative paradigm explains who starves when food exists.
- Marginalisation
- The processes that push people to the edge of political representation, economic security and physical safety. It sits along the sides of the triangle of vulnerability and is one of the named root-cause processes.
- MOVE framework
- A decomposition of vulnerability into exposure, susceptibility and fragility, and lack of resilience, with intervention types and risk governance attached across scales from local to international.
- Adaptive cycle
- A model of system change through slow accumulation of potential and connectedness followed by rapid release and reorganisation. Its value in this unit is that it makes the asymmetry between slow build and fast collapse explicit.
- Endogenic energy
- Energy sourced from inside the Earth, thermal and gravitational, driving mantle convection, plate motion, earthquakes and volcanism.
- Exogenic energy
- Energy sourced from outside the Earth, from the Sun and other astronomical bodies, driving atmospheric circulation, the water cycle, weather and, at the far edge of the unit, space hazards.
- Sendai Framework
- The international instrument for disaster risk reduction covering 2015 to 2030, written in the vocabulary of hazard, exposure, vulnerability and capacity, and setting targets in terms of reducing risk rather than responding to events.
Frameworks for vulnerability and resilience FAQ
Why does a hazards unit spend a week on the history of ideas?
Because the history is not settled, and both of its main products are still in use. The move from divine explanation to physical explanation to social and political explanation left three positions alive rather than replacing each with the next, and modern institutions contain elements of all of them without saying so. That matters practically.
A minister who funds a levee and a community organisation that funds tenure reform are not disagreeing about facts; they are standing at different points on that historical line. Being able to say which paradigm an intervention assumes, what it therefore makes visible and what it hides, is the analytical skill this week is for.
It is also the reason the field is now explicitly interdisciplinary: the early twentieth century tried a purely physical account, spending rose, understanding improved, and losses kept climbing anyway.
What is the Pressure and Release model, in one paragraph?
It traces a disaster backwards through three layers of social causation and forwards through one physical one. At the far left are root causes: limited access to power, structures and resources, and the ideologies and political and economic systems that distribute them. In the middle are dynamic pressures: rapid urbanisation, population change, deforestation, debt, declining soil productivity, absent local institutions.
At the right are unsafe conditions: dangerous locations, unprotected buildings, low incomes, particular groups already at risk. Pressure builds from the left and meets the hazard, producing the disaster. The name is the instruction. Release means acting on the left of the diagram, not the right, because fixing the visible end alone rebuilds the same vulnerability somewhere else.
The compact form the unit uses alongside it is that risk equals hazard times vulnerability.
Is vulnerability something you can actually measure?
The unit puts this as an open methodological question rather than a rhetorical one, and the honest answer is partly. Indicators and surrogates make vulnerability comparable across places, which is what makes it fundable and mappable, and national vulnerability indices built from dozens of indicators genuinely reveal patterns that could not be seen otherwise.
What they also do is fix in a spreadsheet a condition that is relational and changes with the hazard: the same household can be highly vulnerable to a heatwave and barely vulnerable to a flood. A defensible position accepts indicators for triage, resource allocation and comparison, and refuses them as an explanation of any particular case.
The lectorial also pushes back on treating vulnerable as a permanent label on a group, and runs the harder argument that the processes producing marginalisation can also produce coping capacity.
What are the four Earth systems and why does the unit list them?
Lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. The first learning outcome asks you to describe and classify them and to associate the relevant natural hazard types with each, so it is directly examinable as a classification. The unit pairs it with the two energy sources that drive change: endogenic energy, thermal and gravitational, from inside the planet, and exogenic energy from the Sun and other astronomical bodies.
Between them they organise the whole hazard survey: earthquakes, volcanoes and mass movement are lithospheric and endogenically driven, while weather, drought, flood, heat and fire are atmospheric and hydrospheric and exogenically driven. Hold the classification loosely as well as precisely, because the most damaging events cross layers, and a hazard cascade is usually a story about one sphere handing energy to another.
How do I use these frameworks in an answer without just naming them?
Use them as a source of questions rather than as a label. Naming the Pressure and Release model earns very little; running it earns a great deal. Take the case in front of you, list the unsafe conditions that were physically present, ask what produced them in that place and generation, then ask what produced those pressures, and then say where release would have to be applied.
Do the same with the others: the triangle of vulnerability gives you four resource dimensions to check, and the MOVE decomposition tells you whether the problem is exposure, susceptibility or lack of resilience, which are three different interventions. A strong answer usually uses one framework thoroughly rather than three superficially, and says why that one suited the case.
Exam move
This is the chapter to draw rather than to read. Reproduce the Pressure and Release model from memory on one page, with three or four real examples in each of the three layers, and keep it beside you for the rest of the unit, because every hazard week can be run through it.
Second, build a two-column sheet with the hazards paradigm on one side and the alternative paradigm on the other, and fill four rows: what is the unit of analysis, what causes the disaster, what is the intervention, and who is held responsible. Rehearse until you can produce both columns for an unfamiliar case in under a minute, because that is the shape of the comparison the exam rewards.
Third, memorise the four Earth systems with the two energy sources and attach one hazard family to each, since the first learning outcome asks for exactly that and it is the cheapest outcome to secure. Fourth, practise the discrimination the lectorial sets: are vulnerability and resilience opposites, and can one system be high on both.
Being able to argue that they are separate axes, with an example of a community strong on one and weak on the other, protects you from the most common conceptual error in the unit. Finally, when you meet the frameworks again in Weeks 11 to 13, come back here rather than treating them as new material.
The governance stack, the data-quality critique and the bushfire case study are all this week's argument applied, and connecting them explicitly is what makes a synthesis answer look like understanding rather than recall.
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