Building a Vulnerability Analysis Framework for the Coupled Human and Environment System in Watersheds: An Example of Tayal Tribes of Shihman Reservoir Watershed in the Ta-Han River Upper Stream, Jian-Shih Towanship, Hsin-Chu County, Taiwan
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Lin, Kuan-Hui
Abstract
In 1942, Gilbert F. White published a book presenting his idea on human adjustment to floods. The book was a remarkable milestone in the twentieth century’s hazard studies that opened a vigorous trend to study human behavior and perception, instead of biophysical or engineering approach, for understanding basically the relationship between human and hazard. Led by Gilbert F. White and his colleagues, hazard studies in the geography discipline went through an important paradigm shift in the age of 1960s through 1970s. Following the paradigm shift over past twenty years, the concept of vulnerability grows. By incorporating impact assessment, hazard analysis and famine’s political economy in Africa, vulnerability studies develop a diverse research domain that also responds to the contemporary climate change and sustainability problems.
This research takes vulnerability as analytical framework to investigate marginal society’s vulnerability formulation process in the historical development and in the present everyday livelihood practices. There are two research arguments:
1.Local human and environment system has coupled and co-evolutionary characteristics. Drivers from outside society or within local society can create disturbance, perturbation, or impact on local system that push sub-system feedback each other or go through reorganization for responding to or adapting to changes. The evolutionary process has historical embeddedness that accumulates and (re)shape the local human and environmental system conditions, influencing local system’s resilience or vulnerability.
2.Local human and environmental system conditions (re)shaped by historical embeddedness constitute livelihood capitals as resources, that influence human’s ways to organize everyday lives and livelihood activities in present time, and characterize local vulnerability under hazards and the risks.
Hazard and vulnerability are not a purly physical or natural construct. Observing why vulnerability tended to focus on the certain societies also reveals a contextual force that deeply influences the social, political, economic, cultural and environmental dimensions of the locality to form its human-environment specificity that shapes vulnerability. Rather most vulnerability assessment models tend to evaluate vulnerability performance by using broad concepts and generalizing social processes on larger spatial scales. They neglect inner discrepancies and uneven vulnerabilities within or between smaller scale unit such as household or community, and also overlook the indirect socio-economic impact from the hazards or the enduring livelihood impacts. Therefore constructing a vulnerability analysis framework that base on the local development process and can reflect local human and environment specificity for livelihood vulnerability assessment is in urgent need.
This research takes Tayal Mknai and Maliqwan indigenous communities of Shihman reservoir in Ta-Han river upper stream, Jian-Shih Township, Hsin-Chu County, Taiwan as study area. Taiwan was ranked as having the highest disaster risks from cyclones (typhoons), earthquakes, floods and landslides hazards in the UNISDR’s 2009 global assessment report. And since the beginning of the twentieth century Taiwan has gone through rapid social transition and environmental change. Indigenous societies were consequently marginalized in the colonization, civilization, modernization, and capitalist market economy process, and also bore high disaster risks.
Based on literature and historical aero or satellite images collection and analysis, multi-year field survey (2005-2010) and the usage of first-hand survey data, this study builds livelihood vulnerability causality. A community livelihood vulnerability assessment framework is developed accordingly to evaluate local human and environmental conditions that derive daily livelihood and are impacted by hazards. Research findings reveal that:
1.The division of interdependent relationship between human and environment system due to the melting of ‘local” meaning in national institution and big environmental policy, the reliance on capitalist monetary economy, and the depowering of human rights are main and root causes of vulnerability.
2.Livelihood vulnerability assessment result indicates that communities in front part of road system, such as Mami, Llyung, Hbungon, have higher vulnerability. Remote communities such as Smangus, Cinsbu, Smangus na cinsbu have least vulnerability. Mrqwang communities’ vulnerability is especially obvious.
3.Livelihood vulnerability has social and spatial dialectics. Distance and the development’s spatial relations in development processes create different conditions for communities to develop vulnerabilities. Mrqwang communities had frequent connections and goods exchanges since Japanese era that stimulated the division and marketization of local human and environmental system. Mknazi communities had frequent connections mainly after 1970s, the construction of road infrastructure.
4.Present livelihood vulnerability has polarization risk because of institutional resources allocation and social protection policy accumulating mostly in certain less vulnerable communities.
Subjects
vulnerability
hazard
livelihoods
evolution
human-environment system
indigene
Type
thesis
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