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As the emphasis in climate change research, international negotiations, and developing-country activities has shifted from mitigation to adaptation, vulnerability has emerged as a bridge between impacts on one side and the need for adaptive changes on the other. Still, the term vulnerability remains abstract, its meaning changing with the scale, focus, and purpose of each assessment. Understanding regional vulnerability has advanced over the past several decades, with studies using a combination of indicators, case studies and analogues, stakeholder-driven processes, and scenario-building methodologies. As regions become increasingly relevant scales of inquiry for bridging the aggregate and local, for every analysis, it is perhaps most appropriate to ask three “what” questions: “What/who is vulnerable?,” “What is vulnerability?,” and “Vulnerable to what?” The answers to these questions will yield different definitions of vulnerability as well as different methods for assessing it.

The vulnerability of India and Indian states to climate change was assessed using the Vulnerability-Resilience Indicator Prototype (VRIP). The model was adapted from the global/country version to account for Indian dietary practices and data availability with regard to freshwater resources. Results (scaled to world values) show nine Indian states to be moderately resilient to climate change, principally because of low sulfur emissions and a relatively large percentage of unmanaged land. Six states are more vulnerable than India as a whole, attributable largely to sensitivity to sea storm surges. Analyses of results at the state level (Orissa, and comparisons between Maharashtra and Kerala, and Andhra Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh) demonstrate the value of VRIP analyses used in conjunction with other socio-economic information to address initial questions about the sources of vulnerability in particular places. The modeling framework allows analysts and stakeholders to systematically evaluate individual and sets of indicators and to indicate where the likely vulnerabilities are in the area being assessed.

The concept of “science” usually includes commitments to reason, objectivity, and disinterest in the search for truth about the nature of the world. In this view, politics, in the sense of maneuvering to gain power, corrupts both the process and the product of science. However, we show that science is political through and through—in the process of constructing scientific knowledge in maintaining disciplines and in being responsive to partisan sponsorship. Nevertheless, the practitioners of both science and politics maintain the boundary between the two fields; in fact, the disciplines most dependent upon government support tend also to be the most autonomous. This situation becomes understandable when both fields are considered as discursive practices. Then scientific debates can be seen as productive precisely because they derive from an objective agreement about science as an autonomous intellectual enterprise and science itself can be seen as a politics of truth.

Historically, people and their governments have not understood or been prepared for the social, economic, and political instability that can result from energy scarcity or deterioration of the environment. Rapa Nui (Easter Island) is an example from centuries ago where an isolated population irreversibly damaged its finite resources. The cutting of trees to move stone statues had a cascade effect on other resources and led to a dramatic decline in both population and prosperity (Diamond, 2005; Fagan, 2008; Pointing, 1991). More recently, in Darfur, human struggle over access to oil resources, compounded by problems wrought by persistent drought, produced both socioeconomic isolation and regional ethnic disconnection, magnifying a conflict that displaced nearly 2.5 million people (International Crisis Group—Sudan). We contend that disasters such as these can be mitigated or even averted if the complex connections and dependencies of the issues involved can be revealed and if there is a social network to connect isolated areas of expertise and knowledge in order to fully understand and visualize the problems and consequences to leaders and policy makers. This article describes a developing international effort to create a strategic foresight capability addressing the intersection of increasing energy demand and global environmental issues, such as climate change and declining natural resources.

Environmental security and environmental risk are closely related concepts. We argue in this chapter that researchers and policymakers can employ the approaches used in risk analysis to address concerns about environmental security. Environmental degradation most often engenders societal controversy, not armed conflict. Indeed, the potential for armed conflict — a focus of research in environmental security — is slight, and the literature emphasizing possible resource wars distracts attention from the need to study ways in which risk analysis can help to settle environmental controversies.